Philosophy with a deadline

It has been observed by many, including such prestigious figures as Stephen Hawking, that philosophy does not seem to be advancing: they note that contemporary philosophers discuss very much the same things as the pre-Socratics, or that whatever advances have been made in philosophy cannot be credited to the philosophers themselves, but "actual scientists doing the real work" (my words, not anyone else's). I don't think that's an entirely fair assessment especially when it comes to usefulness of philosophy, but it is undeniably true that whereas physics (ever since it started its journey as a distinct field from natural philosophy) has undergone multiple revolutions each of which has only replaced already accurate and practically useful theories with an even deeper and more predictive ones, we still debate the merits and demerits of ideas by ancients who by now have been dead for two millenia.

The prime reason for that, I think, is that science, and mathematics especially, do it on the easy mode, or "cheat": mathematicians have the luxury of proving their findings as theorems, and while scientists will be quick to note that science doesn't "prove" anything in that kind of sense, Nature herself can be seen as the ultimate judge, jury and executioner of wrong ideas: in the absence of these boons, getting philosophy right simply is that much more difficult, so it's no wonder that ruling out theories takes far longer. For the record, the same effect can also be seen between sciences, where physics for instance deals with fundamentally simple phenomenon that are amenable to the spherical cow treatment that does away with all complications, and all the experiments can be replicated exactly as many times as you want, while a field like sociology is all about that nuance and experiments often cannot be replicated, if performed at all, such as the aptly named forbidden experiment.

Still, I do think academic philosophers by large (by no means all of them) share some of the blame, treating their field of study more along the lines of mathematics where all ideas are worthy of being entertained so long as there's no theorem that proves the idea false, when such theorems are very rarely forthcoming: a healthier approach, I think, would be to do as scientists do and assign varying degrees of credences on theories, with the caveat that you'll likely never achieve nearly the same credence on e.g. Humean constructivism being true, as you might on General Relativity offering accurate predictions within its domain of applicability. And how might you go about updating your beliefs in philosophical theories? Well, just as you would update in regards to any other hypothesis, using the tools of bounded rationality, trying to approximate a perfect Bayesian.

These include reducing your credence on the theory if observations are contrary to what the theory predicted (e.g. while there are ways to wiggle out of the Repugnant conclusion, if consequentialism was the correct theory of metaethics, you would have been less likely to encounter apparent paradoxes than if it was an incorrect theory, so discovery of such paradox is according to Bayes' theorem a strike against it), but also concerns such as computational complexity, a formalization of Occam's razor. For instance, thanks to standing on the shoulders of giants, with our modern understanding of such issues we would now know to update down on Ptolemaic model compared to Copernican one, even when Ptolemy offered more accurate predictions (it wasn't until Kepler when heliocentrism won on that count), simply because heliocentrism has much lower computational complexity than geocentrism with its epicycles upon epicycles required to match the observations. For that matter, it's not even that geocentrism is wrong per se, it's perfectly possible to design a coordinate system where Earth is at the center, but its complexity makes it intractable and unpractical: Newton couldn't have come up with his law of universal gravitation without Kepler. Yet, it's not too uncommon to see philosophers clinging on to analogues of geocentrism.

I'm not an academic philosopher, or academic anything for that matter, and while I'm by no means the only one to have presented these sort of ideas (indeed, I don't think I have offered a single original thought up to this point, all having been pilfered from other thinkers, including contemporary academic philosophers such as Daniel Dennett), I do think my interests sit at cross-section of many fields that make me uniquely well-positioned to tackle some of these ideas, and this sort of approach to philosophy (more amenable to finding at least "provisional truths" or preferred theories) is a grand project that is just beginning and can use all the help it can get. I also think that it's important, imperative even, to get philosophy "right": knowledge and wisdom for the sake of living fulfilling lives or just for their own sake are already valuable, but we live in interesting times where our old ways of thinking might find themselves at odds with realities of the rapidly changing world we live in, but possibly even more concerningly, various AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful (and consequently, more capable of having real-world impact), and we haven't gotten the faintest about what kind of world we'd really like to live in, never mind how to impress values of such a world on our computer systems. Since technological progress is unlikely to halt, we have to work double shifts to get this right, hence the idea of doing philosophy with a deadline and the title of this blog (a turn of phrase that I attribute to Nick Bostrom).

So, this is the angle I want to write the blog from. I will try to focus on areas in which I have some original or at least unorthodox ideas, but likely my writings will include random musings from various unrelated topics within philosophy, or perhaps thoughts on topical events. Of note are some aspects where I think the ancients got things right after all, such as virtue ethics and the value of practically oriented personal philosophies. Perchance I will later arrange the writings into a book, or perhaps commenters manage to convince I'm totally misguided, or perhaps I will just give up on blogging (the most likely outcome). Welcome to the blog, anyhow.