I think philosophers should focus on novel contemporarily-unfalsifiable ideas, like are we living in a simulation?; if you are a person outside time with instant access to all moments in the history (past-present-future), how much power do you have?; how would you create time (continuous step? adaptive resolution depending on what beings inside time decide to observe?) etc. Some of these ideas later might become falsifiable and move science forward, even if they sound super sci-fi or even insane right now. Or would be a nice background for a movie/game with some non-trivial thoughts already applied.
Unfalsifiability was a philosophical breakthrough first, and it is now the de facto test to see if an idea has any real world consequence.
To say philosophers should focus on unfalsifiable ideas is to say philosophers should be antipragmatic and inconsequential. One could easily argue that many are, but to encourage it? That's not necessary.
We need to focus on everything, and think about everything. We shouldn't ask "our philosophers" to "think" about things. We should all learn how to think and become better philosophers for ourselves, and find a way to openly contribute the progress of our thoughts.
> To say philosophers should focus on unfalsifiable ideas is to say philosophers should be antipragmatic and inconsequential.
Philosophy is the origin of all the sciences. Starting with Mathematics, as various topics became tractable they became self-standing disciplines, leaving the non-tractable ones behind. Thus inherently philosophers are the ones who work on the really hard problems.
(True, epistemology remains in philosophy but I would argue that the tractable parts moved into mathematics).
AI suffers from the same problem -- once something becomes well accepted people say, "well THAT isn't AI; AI is <some other intractable domain>".
I think it would be more pragmatic to say philosophers should find ways to make unfalsifiable claims falsifiable, and that way the scientists could work on them. But 1) this is actually what scientists already do when confronted with new problems, and 2) the statements rests on pragmatism, which is not mandatory unless of course you are already a scientist.
Ultimately any thought can be advanced with further thinking because concepts and ideas are progressive. Our mind is an incredible machine, and for anyone to feel thinking is only for philosophers is truly doing themselves a disservice. We all need to learn to think harder. And our "philosophers" need to find ways to teach how to think better and harder and newer thoughts. What anyone thinks or thought of in the past is more history than philosophy.
