This post is quite harsh. It really is. But it's also full of truths. When I was in college, I thought philosophy was horseshit. I was studying theoretical physics--the epitome of things to study, or so I thought. I looked down at philosophy.
Then I read more of it--especially the good stuff--and I realized I was quite wrong. I ended up studying philosophy and logic, and became a professor of philosophy, for over 25 years. Being good at philosophy takes years and years of serious study.
Is it possible that as a Logician, you're more akin to a Theoretical Physicist than you are to the sort of "Philosopher" described by The Kid in this blog entry? If I understand the nature of your work correctly, you might occasionally observe or formulate arguments similar to those 'real world" examples The Kid mentioned in relation to abortion and such, but you're probably more interested in analyzing distinctive patterns in unique classes of hypothetical arguments and translating your findings into abstract formal systems. That is to say, you might think of the sort of arguments The Kid was talking about in the same way a Theoretical Physicist thinks about the laboratory ("It's an interesting place to visit, but it's not where I hang my hat"). In other words, if I understand your profession correctly (and I probably don't), then you're basically a Theoretical Physicist who deals with words and arguments rather than particles and energy
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I taught a lot of logic, but I'm definitely a mainstream philosopher, working outside of logic or the philosophy of physics. For an idea of what I do, see here: https://bryanfrances.weebly.com/credentials.html
Great post, Kirk and Parker also made lots of interesting mistakes. Kirk spent too much time on strong definitions but was still smart enough to run circles around the crowd, and Parker was just relying on pattern matching.
What can I say? I'm just some dude trying to work out his own philosophy. With any luck it will be a novel synthesis of Plato, Kant, Jung, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Minsky, and articulated with the literary aura of Camus. Yes, I know that sounds pretty mundane, but I'm a simple man with simple hopes
It would be easier to agree with you if philosophy had something like an objective, empirical way of settling differences, and if there was clear progress in the field. Instead, if we consider animal rights (for example), we have everything from Peter Singer, to Roger Scruton, to Jan Narveson and Carl Cohen. They all have really different approaches to the question, and yet they're all respected in the field. You don't find this in mathematics, for example -- or at least not to the same extent.
The other thing with philosophical arguments is that they're often expressed in really turgid, opaque prose that's hard to parse and hence hard to refute. As someone in another thread said (I'm paraphrasing here), the fact that you can't find a flaw in a philosophical argument is very weak evidence that no flaw exists.
“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” This is not philosophy?
It certainly can be philosophy, but in Feynman's context, that's probably more like "politics". No way would he give up on a theory of His that he found particularly beautiful, just because of the trifling matter of not agreeing with experiment. But I suspect he'd be happy to have experiment invalidate a competitor's theory. Then, there's also "identity politics". I always find it odd when theoretical physicists (eg Krauss, Hawking, etc) speak of themselves as "scientists", as if they had any familiarity with laboratories, whatsoever, as if they were chemists, biologists, or even experimental physicists. But they don't want to simply be cobbled together with mathematicians or philosophers (which is what they actually are). No, they want to be their own brand, and project the mystique of being Alpha Scientists
"No way would [Richard Feynman] give up on a theory of His that he found particularly beautiful, just because of the trifling matter of not agreeing with experiment."
Feynman had his flaws (some would consider him a misogynist), but that wasn't one of them. He is rightly remembered as a brilliant physicist who made groundbreaking contributions in quantum mechanics. He also gave a famous speech called "Cargo Cult Science" where he discussed the importance of scientific integrity, using the concept of cargo cults as a metaphor for practices that have the appearance of science without actually following the scientific method.
Feynman would absolutely give up on a theory if it didn't match the experimental evidence.
That is an interesting take on Feynman. But consider this alternative narrative: Feynman was basically a cleverness machine, and possibly the world's best mathematical problem solver at the time, and he probably knew this. Moreover, he was, as you suggest, possibly something of a chauvinist. Specifically, an ego-driven chauvinist who liked strippers and hookers. Strippers and hookers like macho manly men, not cloistered mathematical/philosophical bookworms. Therefore, it was in his interests to distance himself from that stereotype. An obvious solution is to promote the claim that physicists drop mics like bombs. They work in manly labs with dangerous chemicals and accelerators, and the army socks up to them. They don't just sit around and fiddle with their sliderules. Macho manly men exhibit clear forms of dominance over competitors, even if many of these exhibitions are little more than showmanship that they don't actually believe. Dismissing competing approaches as Cargo Cult is a clear form of dominance
Not really. The best discovery of XX century physics is that the Schodinger and Heisenberg formalisms of quantum mechanics are mathematically equivalent. This is the kind of difference no experiment can settle, because there is no difference.
Is the implication here that if physicalism (which speaks of the material) and idealism (which speaks of the conscious) can be shown to be isomporphic metanarratives, then there's no substantive difference (as they describe the same data, only in different words), and the mind-body problem reduces to a curious figment of our imaginations (or, equivalently, an abnormal brainwave pattern)?
I suspect that if a philosopher is unable, in principle, to construct a physical/mechanical analogy for his ideas, then he's just babbling, and he's got no idea what he's talking about. Ofc, I could just be babbling in this post, myself
Why? You are conscious being and you stream of consciousness is real, in fact immediately real. That stream is determined by a physical process, but it does not make it less real.
This is very true. But my tentative metanarrative on the generation of metanarratives includes the somewhat ad hoc definition, "A metanarrative is said to be 'valid' if it corresponds to a mechanical analog, and 'babble' if it does not"
Disagree: narratives that go against physical observation are Tarsky false. But as long as you do not contradict physical reality, the narrative is not wrong. Not wrong is well defined, true is probably a word to be avoided except for descriptive propositions about reality, or formal relations that always hold. More complex mental objects at most can respect the truth, more than being true.
Well, you could alternatively use this definitional scheme:
"Interesting": narratives that seem to contradict known physical data but which might conceivably align with constructable systems
"Not wrong": narratives that seem to align with known data and which suggest obvious physical analogs
"Not even wrong" (babble): narratives that are are so bewildering or incoherent that the only physical representation of them is the pathological brain functioning that caused them
While “narrative” is not so well defined as the fields and particles of a physicalist description of reality, nor are exactly concrete object in the conscious mind, I would say that I don’t disagree with you.
There are plenty of interesting answers, fewer satisfying answers, very few answers so satisfying that everyone nods their heads and moves on. Are interesting answers not good? Are conversation enders good?
Philosophy should perhaps help us live better lives. Answers that can do that are indeed few, but we're stuck looking for them.
"both a fetus and a baby outside the womb can’t survive without their parents"
Needing *someone, anyone* to help you survive is more different from 'needing a particular person to carry you around in their body at all times or you'd die' than I think you imply. But yes, abortion *is* complicated and they are terribly smug.
"Obviously, the fetus is alive! This is a trivial biological fact. But not everything alive has rights or moral significance—bacteria are alive but they’re not deserving of rights. The permissibility of abortion is about whether the fetus is the sort of thing deserving of moral consideration, not whether it is alive."
Yes, but it's not just whether it is deserving of moral consideration - it is. It's whether that consideration is so large that we're ok with impinging on someone else's rights by forcing them to keep the "parasite" until it's viable to survive without them. This seems to give the fetus *more* moral consideration than actual living people - given that we don't require, for instance, that someone donates their organs to a person they've injured or otherwise could be seen as having a responsibility to sacrifice in order to help.
We don't require people to donate organs to those they've injured, but if you kill someone you are going to jail for the rest of your life. It seems like, given that the only way to get the fetus out of someone is to kill him, and given that the person who the fetus is inside is that fetus's mother and presumably has a duty of care to him, is the pro-life position really privileging the fetus any more than we privilege older kids? After all, it's not "anyones" responsibility to care for a newborn, it's his parents. If they don't they're going to jail for neglect, while a random person on the street who saw the baby and did nothing is not.
Well, not really because parents can give their child up for adoption and the state will take it. But yes, I agree it’s not an easy problem, and I used to be more anti abortion, but I now feel that prioritizing the bodily autonomy of the mother over the life of the fetus is the appropriate compromise given other laws and norms and the outcomes it leads to.
Yes, but parents have a duty to actually get someone to adopt their child before abandoning them: if they don't, they go to jail. In the case of a pregnant woman it's not possible for someone to meaningfully "adopt" a fetus; yet if there were parents who wanted to give their child up for adoption, and it wasn't possible, that wouldn't be an excuse for neglecting their child. Parents have a duty to their children, that duty can be transferred to others in some cases, but the inability to transfer it in others does not remove the duty.
Can’t parents also do voluntary foster care though? Regardless, I do think parents have a moral duty to care for their children, but I think that duty is much weaker for a fetus and that this duty increases as it develops. Regardless of when you think personhood begins though, I don’t think anyone should be legally *required* to allow any other person to parasitically live off of their body, although I take your point that a new baby is not all that much less parasitic right after birth vs before.
I also think consenting to the duty is relevant - if you’ve decided to go through with the pregnancy you’ve signed yourself up to long term obligations, this is the same reason I judge late in pregnancy abortions far more than early ones-if you’ve failed to end the pregnancy early and then allow the fetus to develop into something that’s closer and closer to deserving the rights of personhood and then kill it, that’s awful and disturbing. That said, there are enough edge circumstances at all points that I’m currently in favor of a basically maximally liberal position on abortion. Of course some people feel that consenting to sex is consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, I just think that’s not really an informed consent in most cases.
I personally don’t think I would ever get an abortion (leaving some room for terrible circumstances) because I think it’s immoral, but I still think it should be legal given where we draw the line with respect to bodily autonomy in other areas as well as for utilitarian reasons.
> Of course some people feel that consenting to sex is consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, I just think that’s not really an informed consent in most cases.
...because people don't know that sex creates babies? Unless you literally don't know that sex is the process by which humans procreate, and that human procreation involves pregnancy, how could there *not* be informed consent to the possibility of pregnancy?
This is also true of Economics. The vast majority of people talk about economic subjects every day, but are hopelessly confused with little or no formal training in the subject.
In neither of these cases does it stop the layperson from voting on these matters and thereby imposing this ignorance on the rest of us, however.
I’ve never been able to tell if I understand philosophy or not. Sometimes it seems too simple so I think I’m missing something. Other times it seems incomprehensible so I think either they’re confused or it’s over my head. Commentary around philosophy is all over the place so I don’t even know what’s signal and what’s noise.
Me too. I want to add that I tend to see the world in pretty black and white terms, so when I’m presented with any type of argument, philosophical or not, I don’t evaluate by myself whether or not it’s sound and valid, I evaluate it by how much I agree with it, based on what other people have said, and I believe my agreement signals something true about the world. I consider myself to be relatively rational and thoughtful regardless of whether or not I understand philosophy, because i have experienced the world in a way that matches the experience of the people I love most and I know those people will never mislead me purposely.
Formal training rarely creates good answers either. Formally trained analytical philosophers think everything can be mathematically determined using bad statistical inferences. Continental training gives us Kant, Rawls, and Foucault, who have only proven to be strong at rhetoric rather than predicting reality.
My "dream philosophy" would analytically/mathematically distill that magical "influence" or rhetoric of the continental philosophers into a substance that could be tapped on demand. So I guess I'm something of an alchemist
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.”
The last paragraph is humbling - there's no way to reasonably reject it. I think the best way to approach this is to simply acknowledge that I (and everyone else) am likely wrong about many things I currently believe. That is ok - accepting this makes it easier to navigate the world, both socially and intellectually.
Do you have any recommendations for how to be less wrong more quickly? I'm well aware I'm bad at philosophy, but I cannot figure out how to get less wrong. Is there any particular area of study you would prioritize, or any particular skill you think is especially impactful? Better yet, do you have a diagnostic tool to evaluate what someone's philosophical strengths and weaknesses are? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
“Whenever people discuss… life’s interesting questions… they’re doing philosophy.” Thanks for this — it’s maybe the clearest statement I’ve heard as to why philosophy isn’t an add-on to education, but near the center.
I’m a bit unusual here — I’ve actually dedicated my life to bringing this sort of education into being — but I bet there are a lot of readers who are interested in your thoughts as to how we can fix this problem. Any thoughts? Anyone you think is doing a particularly good job?
I won't read this, I'm super good at philosophy and this article is patently absurd.
This post is quite harsh. It really is. But it's also full of truths. When I was in college, I thought philosophy was horseshit. I was studying theoretical physics--the epitome of things to study, or so I thought. I looked down at philosophy.
Then I read more of it--especially the good stuff--and I realized I was quite wrong. I ended up studying philosophy and logic, and became a professor of philosophy, for over 25 years. Being good at philosophy takes years and years of serious study.
Is it possible that as a Logician, you're more akin to a Theoretical Physicist than you are to the sort of "Philosopher" described by The Kid in this blog entry? If I understand the nature of your work correctly, you might occasionally observe or formulate arguments similar to those 'real world" examples The Kid mentioned in relation to abortion and such, but you're probably more interested in analyzing distinctive patterns in unique classes of hypothetical arguments and translating your findings into abstract formal systems. That is to say, you might think of the sort of arguments The Kid was talking about in the same way a Theoretical Physicist thinks about the laboratory ("It's an interesting place to visit, but it's not where I hang my hat"). In other words, if I understand your profession correctly (and I probably don't), then you're basically a Theoretical Physicist who deals with words and arguments rather than particles and energy
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I taught a lot of logic, but I'm definitely a mainstream philosopher, working outside of logic or the philosophy of physics. For an idea of what I do, see here: https://bryanfrances.weebly.com/credentials.html
Bryan
So true
Great post, Kirk and Parker also made lots of interesting mistakes. Kirk spent too much time on strong definitions but was still smart enough to run circles around the crowd, and Parker was just relying on pattern matching.
What can I say? I'm just some dude trying to work out his own philosophy. With any luck it will be a novel synthesis of Plato, Kant, Jung, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Minsky, and articulated with the literary aura of Camus. Yes, I know that sounds pretty mundane, but I'm a simple man with simple hopes
should read “neither IS very good, not “neither ARE very good.” “Neither” takes a singular verb. Pretty good article though!
It would be easier to agree with you if philosophy had something like an objective, empirical way of settling differences, and if there was clear progress in the field. Instead, if we consider animal rights (for example), we have everything from Peter Singer, to Roger Scruton, to Jan Narveson and Carl Cohen. They all have really different approaches to the question, and yet they're all respected in the field. You don't find this in mathematics, for example -- or at least not to the same extent.
The other thing with philosophical arguments is that they're often expressed in really turgid, opaque prose that's hard to parse and hence hard to refute. As someone in another thread said (I'm paraphrasing here), the fact that you can't find a flaw in a philosophical argument is very weak evidence that no flaw exists.
But in physics you find people who are respected with very different views of physics.
Yes, and you have folks like Feynman who say philosophy is about as relevant to physicists as ornithology is to birds
“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” This is not philosophy?
It certainly can be philosophy, but in Feynman's context, that's probably more like "politics". No way would he give up on a theory of His that he found particularly beautiful, just because of the trifling matter of not agreeing with experiment. But I suspect he'd be happy to have experiment invalidate a competitor's theory. Then, there's also "identity politics". I always find it odd when theoretical physicists (eg Krauss, Hawking, etc) speak of themselves as "scientists", as if they had any familiarity with laboratories, whatsoever, as if they were chemists, biologists, or even experimental physicists. But they don't want to simply be cobbled together with mathematicians or philosophers (which is what they actually are). No, they want to be their own brand, and project the mystique of being Alpha Scientists
"No way would [Richard Feynman] give up on a theory of His that he found particularly beautiful, just because of the trifling matter of not agreeing with experiment."
Feynman had his flaws (some would consider him a misogynist), but that wasn't one of them. He is rightly remembered as a brilliant physicist who made groundbreaking contributions in quantum mechanics. He also gave a famous speech called "Cargo Cult Science" where he discussed the importance of scientific integrity, using the concept of cargo cults as a metaphor for practices that have the appearance of science without actually following the scientific method.
Feynman would absolutely give up on a theory if it didn't match the experimental evidence.
That is an interesting take on Feynman. But consider this alternative narrative: Feynman was basically a cleverness machine, and possibly the world's best mathematical problem solver at the time, and he probably knew this. Moreover, he was, as you suggest, possibly something of a chauvinist. Specifically, an ego-driven chauvinist who liked strippers and hookers. Strippers and hookers like macho manly men, not cloistered mathematical/philosophical bookworms. Therefore, it was in his interests to distance himself from that stereotype. An obvious solution is to promote the claim that physicists drop mics like bombs. They work in manly labs with dangerous chemicals and accelerators, and the army socks up to them. They don't just sit around and fiddle with their sliderules. Macho manly men exhibit clear forms of dominance over competitors, even if many of these exhibitions are little more than showmanship that they don't actually believe. Dismissing competing approaches as Cargo Cult is a clear form of dominance
Not really. The best discovery of XX century physics is that the Schodinger and Heisenberg formalisms of quantum mechanics are mathematically equivalent. This is the kind of difference no experiment can settle, because there is no difference.
Is the implication here that if physicalism (which speaks of the material) and idealism (which speaks of the conscious) can be shown to be isomporphic metanarratives, then there's no substantive difference (as they describe the same data, only in different words), and the mind-body problem reduces to a curious figment of our imaginations (or, equivalently, an abnormal brainwave pattern)?
Our imagination is as real anything can be. It caused by a physical process, but immediately real.
This is a kind of nonspecific platitude you could say about any field.
But it is more true about some fields than others.
But that's usually when there isn't strong empirical evidence that favors one side over the other.
I suspect that if a philosopher is unable, in principle, to construct a physical/mechanical analogy for his ideas, then he's just babbling, and he's got no idea what he's talking about. Ofc, I could just be babbling in this post, myself
Why? You are conscious being and you stream of consciousness is real, in fact immediately real. That stream is determined by a physical process, but it does not make it less real.
This is very true. But my tentative metanarrative on the generation of metanarratives includes the somewhat ad hoc definition, "A metanarrative is said to be 'valid' if it corresponds to a mechanical analog, and 'babble' if it does not"
Disagree: narratives that go against physical observation are Tarsky false. But as long as you do not contradict physical reality, the narrative is not wrong. Not wrong is well defined, true is probably a word to be avoided except for descriptive propositions about reality, or formal relations that always hold. More complex mental objects at most can respect the truth, more than being true.
Well, you could alternatively use this definitional scheme:
"Interesting": narratives that seem to contradict known physical data but which might conceivably align with constructable systems
"Not wrong": narratives that seem to align with known data and which suggest obvious physical analogs
"Not even wrong" (babble): narratives that are are so bewildering or incoherent that the only physical representation of them is the pathological brain functioning that caused them
While “narrative” is not so well defined as the fields and particles of a physicalist description of reality, nor are exactly concrete object in the conscious mind, I would say that I don’t disagree with you.
My husband says, "There are no bad questions. There are no good answers."
Very Zen.
There are plenty of interesting answers, fewer satisfying answers, very few answers so satisfying that everyone nods their heads and moves on. Are interesting answers not good? Are conversation enders good?
Philosophy should perhaps help us live better lives. Answers that can do that are indeed few, but we're stuck looking for them.
"both a fetus and a baby outside the womb can’t survive without their parents"
Needing *someone, anyone* to help you survive is more different from 'needing a particular person to carry you around in their body at all times or you'd die' than I think you imply. But yes, abortion *is* complicated and they are terribly smug.
"Obviously, the fetus is alive! This is a trivial biological fact. But not everything alive has rights or moral significance—bacteria are alive but they’re not deserving of rights. The permissibility of abortion is about whether the fetus is the sort of thing deserving of moral consideration, not whether it is alive."
Yes, but it's not just whether it is deserving of moral consideration - it is. It's whether that consideration is so large that we're ok with impinging on someone else's rights by forcing them to keep the "parasite" until it's viable to survive without them. This seems to give the fetus *more* moral consideration than actual living people - given that we don't require, for instance, that someone donates their organs to a person they've injured or otherwise could be seen as having a responsibility to sacrifice in order to help.
We don't require people to donate organs to those they've injured, but if you kill someone you are going to jail for the rest of your life. It seems like, given that the only way to get the fetus out of someone is to kill him, and given that the person who the fetus is inside is that fetus's mother and presumably has a duty of care to him, is the pro-life position really privileging the fetus any more than we privilege older kids? After all, it's not "anyones" responsibility to care for a newborn, it's his parents. If they don't they're going to jail for neglect, while a random person on the street who saw the baby and did nothing is not.
Well, not really because parents can give their child up for adoption and the state will take it. But yes, I agree it’s not an easy problem, and I used to be more anti abortion, but I now feel that prioritizing the bodily autonomy of the mother over the life of the fetus is the appropriate compromise given other laws and norms and the outcomes it leads to.
Yes, but parents have a duty to actually get someone to adopt their child before abandoning them: if they don't, they go to jail. In the case of a pregnant woman it's not possible for someone to meaningfully "adopt" a fetus; yet if there were parents who wanted to give their child up for adoption, and it wasn't possible, that wouldn't be an excuse for neglecting their child. Parents have a duty to their children, that duty can be transferred to others in some cases, but the inability to transfer it in others does not remove the duty.
Can’t parents also do voluntary foster care though? Regardless, I do think parents have a moral duty to care for their children, but I think that duty is much weaker for a fetus and that this duty increases as it develops. Regardless of when you think personhood begins though, I don’t think anyone should be legally *required* to allow any other person to parasitically live off of their body, although I take your point that a new baby is not all that much less parasitic right after birth vs before.
I also think consenting to the duty is relevant - if you’ve decided to go through with the pregnancy you’ve signed yourself up to long term obligations, this is the same reason I judge late in pregnancy abortions far more than early ones-if you’ve failed to end the pregnancy early and then allow the fetus to develop into something that’s closer and closer to deserving the rights of personhood and then kill it, that’s awful and disturbing. That said, there are enough edge circumstances at all points that I’m currently in favor of a basically maximally liberal position on abortion. Of course some people feel that consenting to sex is consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, I just think that’s not really an informed consent in most cases.
I personally don’t think I would ever get an abortion (leaving some room for terrible circumstances) because I think it’s immoral, but I still think it should be legal given where we draw the line with respect to bodily autonomy in other areas as well as for utilitarian reasons.
> Of course some people feel that consenting to sex is consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, I just think that’s not really an informed consent in most cases.
...because people don't know that sex creates babies? Unless you literally don't know that sex is the process by which humans procreate, and that human procreation involves pregnancy, how could there *not* be informed consent to the possibility of pregnancy?
This is also true of Economics. The vast majority of people talk about economic subjects every day, but are hopelessly confused with little or no formal training in the subject.
In neither of these cases does it stop the layperson from voting on these matters and thereby imposing this ignorance on the rest of us, however.
I'm a lot more confused about economics than about philosophy.
I’ve never been able to tell if I understand philosophy or not. Sometimes it seems too simple so I think I’m missing something. Other times it seems incomprehensible so I think either they’re confused or it’s over my head. Commentary around philosophy is all over the place so I don’t even know what’s signal and what’s noise.
Me too. I want to add that I tend to see the world in pretty black and white terms, so when I’m presented with any type of argument, philosophical or not, I don’t evaluate by myself whether or not it’s sound and valid, I evaluate it by how much I agree with it, based on what other people have said, and I believe my agreement signals something true about the world. I consider myself to be relatively rational and thoughtful regardless of whether or not I understand philosophy, because i have experienced the world in a way that matches the experience of the people I love most and I know those people will never mislead me purposely.
Sturgeon's law applies.
Infanticide isn't obviously impermissible https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Michael%20Tooley,%20Abortion%20and%20infanticide.pdf
Maybe “obvious” has a technical meaning here, “I don’t want to think about it.”
Formal training rarely creates good answers either. Formally trained analytical philosophers think everything can be mathematically determined using bad statistical inferences. Continental training gives us Kant, Rawls, and Foucault, who have only proven to be strong at rhetoric rather than predicting reality.
Rawls is analytic philosophy.
The worst of both worlds, an analytical demagogue
Very solid take. Socrates would likely have some choice words about that particular method of doing philosophy
My "dream philosophy" would analytically/mathematically distill that magical "influence" or rhetoric of the continental philosophers into a substance that could be tapped on demand. So I guess I'm something of an alchemist
Like this? :D
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.”
Goddammit, it looks like some asshole managed to solve philosophy. Guess I'll move on to a new hobby
Wouldn’t those substances just be mind altering drugs?
The last paragraph is humbling - there's no way to reasonably reject it. I think the best way to approach this is to simply acknowledge that I (and everyone else) am likely wrong about many things I currently believe. That is ok - accepting this makes it easier to navigate the world, both socially and intellectually.
Do you have any recommendations for how to be less wrong more quickly? I'm well aware I'm bad at philosophy, but I cannot figure out how to get less wrong. Is there any particular area of study you would prioritize, or any particular skill you think is especially impactful? Better yet, do you have a diagnostic tool to evaluate what someone's philosophical strengths and weaknesses are? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
“Whenever people discuss… life’s interesting questions… they’re doing philosophy.” Thanks for this — it’s maybe the clearest statement I’ve heard as to why philosophy isn’t an add-on to education, but near the center.
I’m a bit unusual here — I’ve actually dedicated my life to bringing this sort of education into being — but I bet there are a lot of readers who are interested in your thoughts as to how we can fix this problem. Any thoughts? Anyone you think is doing a particularly good job?