Is there a better source for the economists survey? That is very interesting and I'd like to see more details about the study. Specifically, how many economists were surveyed, and how were the questions asked?
I lean towards a sort of death. But perhaps we're all dying and reanimating in between each Planck time instant anyway, in which case we shouldn't worry about it too much :)
That quite defines how I think about it. The current "me" is as different from the me within a second from now as from a theoretical me at the other end of a teleportation device that delivers me there within a second. The three selves are all distinct from each other and in fact are as distinct (and as close) to each other as from any other human being, with the caveat that the 'me's a second from now inherit all the memories and physical state from the current me, whereas a different person does not.
But in terms of selves, of consciousness, they're all isolated phenonema. I think consciousness is merely an illusion, we think we have continuity because we inherit the memories and thought processes from the self from the moment before, but all that exists is a moment of awareness (the "now"), which is analogous to a clock of a computer processor.
Yes. And I really do think it approaches infinity, or else our wetware has a limited clocking speed and that would define a single atomic moment of awareness (seems more likely since we're highly advanced computers, but computers nonetheless.) Even as I was writing the comment several clocks might have been spent not on it, but picking up ambient sound and other stimulae. To the extent that I'm half conscious to these other things, I was actually fully conscious to them though for only a few number of clocks, whereas things on which I seem to be fully conscious are demanding the majority of my (multi)processor clocks. There's the case for whether we can truly multitask--are we multi-core? We definitely are as to the many functions done subconsciously, but what about the conscious regions of the brain? But to simplify the thought experiment, we can simply think that we can only really spend any single moment of awareness on a single atomic thing, and like a computer we juggle attention between various things so fast as to make it seem we're doing them all concurrently (like the various applications simultaneously running on a computer.)
The upside, of course, is that my philosophy frees me up for gultfree teletransportation. Bring it on!
Fun fact: there are 18.5 million billion trillion quadrillion Planck times per second. So you can think of the universe as a simulation that runs at 1.85*10^43 FPS, where each "frame" sees all light-speed particles move one Planck length in their direction of travel.
Is there any actual justification for viewing spacetime as being discrete, with unit 1 Planck length/time? As far as I'm aware, the Planck length is just a length you get when you multiply a load of constants together.
You're absolutely right. The plank time is just a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe. This is comparable to how very fast moving objects needed more than Newtonian physics to describe, namely relativity, or how very small objects needed quantum mechanics. It may be that that new physics is discrete, but at this point we have no idea.
The person who popped out of the other end of the teleporter would be doubtful.
Does it make a difference if it's a teleporter that destroys the original as an necessary part of its function, vs one that destroyed the original but didn't need to do so, vs one that did not destroy the original?
I don't think there's much doubt about whether a document received via fax is the original or not, regardless of whether or not the sent document is shredded immediately after.
It could create a replica that's exactly the same atom-for-atom, but it would still be a replica. Destroying the original at the source would make it a 'teletransporter', and not destroying the original at the source would make it a 'duplicator'.
By any external measure the replica could be functionally and physically identical to the original, but so long as new matter is used it would still be a replica.
Physically there isn't really a difference between new matter and old matter. Suppose that instead of moving an electron from A to B, you destroyed an electron at A and created one at B (through some kind of reaction between other fundamental particles). There isn't really a physical difference between the two resulting situations. Unlike conventional objects, electrons can't be marked or otherwise identified, they are really exactly identical. Electrons are just blips in the continuous fields of physics (electromagnetic field, higgs field, etc). If you could do the same with a complete person, then there may not be any physical difference between moving the person or "teleporting" the person. So if there is fundamentally no difference between those two things, then perhaps we should be agnostic to whether it is teleportation or creation-destruction. The really difficult questions are about the consciousness of such a person, and I think at this point we don't have an answer for those questions.
What should hackers expect regarding the subjectivity/objectivity of aesthetic value? Should we have expected that particular choice to have broken down into thirds? What does it mean that it did break down into thirds?
Even with a minor in philosophy & a degree in linguistics which involved a good deal of philosophies of language and mind, i'm not sure what to make of the results of this survey. Anyone have a better perspective on what the deal is here?
It's a great essay but this passage highlights to me the sillyness of philosophy:
> I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people.
Take a living person and excise part of their brain, and they will continue to live. There have been accidents, injuries, and surgeries that have proven that. I don't know about fully half, but I would not be surprised if it worked.
BUT - take half a brain and transplant it into a different body? There is zero evidence today that that is even possible.
One might say that such technology just hasn't been invented yet. True. But maybe it will never be invented; and thus it's really science fiction disguised as philosophy. I think quite a lot of philosophy ends up being disguised fiction--science or otherwise.
It's great to see numbers but the reality is to get exact answers from any professional Philosopher you would need to let them rewrite the question every time. Working with pro and academic Philosophers on symposiums taught me that even the folks in the same micro sub-field with each other have these chasms of interpretation that led to huge difference in expression.
That's one hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis would be to suggest that the more educated one becomes in philosophy the less that religion makes sense, and the clearer it becomes that there is no evidence for theism.
(Note, I'm not advocating for either of these hypotheses, but correlation is not causation.)
Your alternative proposition (hypothesis has a different meaning in philosophy than it does in the sciences) is rather confusing from a philosophical perspective. What is 'educated'? Education is a culturally relative idea that is very hard to closely define. Thus, for a religious person being 'educated' may mean something very different from a gypsy who grows up on the streets of Paris who is very 'educated' in the workings of life on the street. Does the 'educated' individual mean some one who can create amazing works of art? Or, does it indicate some one who has memorized and repeats certain culturally important texts and ideas?
There is certainly a cultural side to philosophy in Modern Western society that is largely anti-religious from the very beginning. I started out as your average fervent evangelical Christian, which I am no longer, but it was initially incredibly uncomfortable in a philosophy department to try to hold on to certain belief systems. However, it is not necessarily for the reasons that one would believe. It is a culturally phenomenon. In older generations, it was entirely unacceptable to be religious and be in philosophy. You were naturally routed towards theology by the university staff because the topics of conversation are entirely different; modern philosophy does not concern itself with the question of religion. Yet, the vast majority of older philosophy professors, when being honest, will acknowledge that despite their atheism there are still countless religious systems that have fascinating thinkers and concepts that are both rational and consistent.
It just so happens that in America, Christianity is the de facto symbol for religion and it is both irrational and inconsistent.
I seriously doubt that. Most "professional philosophers" these days are doing analytical philosophy, and it's been at least 500 years since a non-crazy person has been persuaded one way or the other about God by studying logic.
I suppose Georg Cantor might be an exception to this.
Gödel had an unpublished ontological "proof" [1] that's fairly simple to understand. It hinges on two things: 1.) accepting a logical system in which possibly necessary truths are necessary; 2.) accepting his argument that it's possible for god to exist.
Not knowing which faculties at which institutions this derives from (although, one could probably assume that they're not Theist institutions) that is a plausible explanation.
However, if you change the Population selection to the "No Affiliation" option the numbers are still pretty skewed in the atheist direction.
It's worth noting that philosophy's questions very often treat theistic worldviews with a significant amount of irreverence. A lot of these questions are relatively worthless when you can answer them with, "Whatever God decided on."
Indeed, according to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences [1], the group of philosophers had about the same number of atheists, more theists and less agnostics.
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
Accept or lean toward: [..]
Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible 217 / 931 (23.3%)
In academic philosophy, a "zombie" is a person without a "soul" - it is physically indistinguishable from any other person, but lacks conscious experience. It simulates the outward appearance of conscious experience by virtue of having a fully functional brain.
Sadly, this question is not related to the possibility that chemical spills can cause the dead to rise and eat brains.
Imagine a being that acted exactly like a human, it spoke, laughed, etc. - everything that you'd imagine a human being to do. However, it does not actually feel or think.
For example, if you were to prick one of these "zombies," they would say "ouch," recoil, perhaps berate you, but the zombie does not actually feel pain - it's a purely mechanical process.
Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of being, properties, identity, etc. What one means by whether such zombies are metaphysically possible is really an answer to the question: are such zombies really any different than how we are?
For those of you interested in learning more, look up these terms (I studied philosophy related to Complex Systems, and zombies were a central question in my thesis):
John Searle's Chinese Room, Turing Test, physicalism, Conway's Game of Life
It is. A lot of what metaphysics is concerned with now has a lot to do with AI.
You can think of zombies as the analog to robots (as is canonical with most AI questions). Robots are essentially philosophical zombies, should we get them to a level of sophistication such that they would be indistinguishable from a human being. Whether such robots could be considered "living," "thinking," or "feeling," is a question to be answered by philosophy.
If you're more interested read about John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. It gives a great example of what you're thinking of.
Metaphysical possibility is a slightly stronger version of logical possibility (although there is some debate about the exact relation.) For example, it is metaphysically possible for information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light.
There is a stronger version of possibility: nomological possibility, which means something like "possible under the laws of nature". It is nomologically impossible for information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light.
In the context of the philosophy of mind, this question is about whether or not it's possible (in some metaphysically possible world) for there to be fully functioning humans, but minus experience. If so, then experience is a true explanandum.
See [1] for an account of these modal truth states, [2] for an account of philosophical zombies.
Humans fail(1) quite a bit on this problem when it comes to animals. One case I remember was a driver who avoided a dog on the highway which resulted in the driver and 3 teenage girls dying.
I am not sure what a self-driving car is going to do.
1) "fail" as in get the car load of people killed.
But switching requires an action that will cause the death of another.
Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else.
People that pull the switch are thought to have more sociopathic tendencies even though doing the action would result in a lower overall number of deaths.
> Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else.
Whether or not the action is rational depends on the underlying principles. If the most important thing is to minimize lives lost, then the moral math of causing harm to one for the benefit of many is simple. However, not everyone would agree with this principle. It's not necessarily more emotional.
Inaction vs. action is an important distinction to some.
By rational I mean the traditional "by the numbers" type of people, not if the action (or inaction) is a rational choice. Pulling the lever is the obvious choice for the rational type due to loss of less lives, a strictly numeric calculation with no regards to feelings.
Discussing this problem with my G/F showed me a side which is from what I would call a "non-rational" or emotional person. Their choice not to pull the lever is just as rational to them, but not in the cold, hard, numeric way of the rational person. To them it is rational to not cause harm to others if they would never have been harmed, even if more people will be harmed in the end.
It was a bit of a heated discussion that really made me stop and think about why this is such an important question. There is no right answer and each side is quick to justify exactly why their choice is the "right" choice. And the more you think about it the more you realize why both sides can think the way they do; a perfect philosophical question :)
The comment about sociopaths pulling the lever was due to the test being given in prisons to people that were diagnosed as sociopaths. That was the choice that the majority of them took when given the test.
That makes sense and I mostly agree. But if you look at it from another perspective, pulling the lever is emotional too in a sense, because the puller feels that less deaths is the better outcome. Ethics is fundamentally about what we feel is right (which is influenced by the society a lot).
I originally heard of the Trolly Problem in an episode of the The Brain Series on Charlie Rose where the guest neroscientists presented that viewpoint. I personally don't belive it, but that was the messaage they were presenting.
The series is both fascinating and frightening in way. I reccomend watching it to see the current ideas in brain science presented by the people creataing them.
In addition to the aforementioned Charlie Rose episode, I recently saw Kevin Dutton talk about this in a short Big Think video [1] (or rather, the converse). I have no idea if it's valid.
One person can get out of the way more easily than 10. Of course, abstract hypothetical questions don't answer what one would do under real circumstances, e.g. there's a difference between seeing an athletic, aware guy on one track who you know can get out of the way vs. a blind lady.
I get you are joking but... That's just as bad as thinking that the most popular answer is the right one. The best you can do is to decide which one is best by analyzing the contents, not the % values.
No, but there is a question concerning moral realism. Since moral relativism is a type of moral anti-realism which is entertained by 27.7% of respondents, it follows that less than 27.7% philosophers are relativists.
Yes, I'm aware that majority of people don't agree with my philosophical views, but I think they're pretty rational, not the usual philosophical babble :)
Your prejudice is showing. Philosophy is about knowing and reasoning about reality. There are charlatans who try to pass off their weak ideas through obfuscation, but there is a core to the endeavor of philosophy, and good philosophers out there making noteworthy observations about reality.
Well, from my experience, the problem with most of philosophy is not being able to get to the core. Significant part of philosophy is just arguing what is the meaning of some word or what is the correct label for some idea (ie. it's about matching meanings with words). Another thing that bugs me is that many psychological and sociological problems are considered to be philosophical problems.
It's sad that more people don't study the philosophy and sociology of Science, especially people in engineering and the sciences.
Scientists make ontological and metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe, and unless they avail themselves of the philosophy of science there are a lot of arguments that one can't defend against.. There are a lot of fundamentalists who avail themselves of Thomas Kuhn's argument that scientific progress is entirely just cultural consensus amongst scientists, and has no additional metaphysical reality.
Fighting off that argument is squarely in the philosophy of science, as is being able to articulate what it means to observe, theorize about, and know reality.
I don't know if it's sad really. I guess it depends what your priorities are. There's fighting off philosophical arguments, and there's getting things done. Too much emphasis on either one reduces your ability to do the other.
Fighting off philosophical arguments is a fundamental part of politics and convincing other people that you are right.
You're also right that there's only so much time in the day, but it depends on who you have to go through to get stuff done. Who do you need money, or approval from.
I think I have a relatively good understanding of consciousness:
* Content of consciousness is the only thing that we can be sure of. Let's say I'm scared. This fact is true no matter if I'm in a dream or hallucinating. (We could argue if "scared" is the correct label for the feeling but that's not the point.)
* It's impossible to define consciousness objectively. Subjective definition is simple: Consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc. There's no way to create a definition, that 1) is logically consistent 2) matches our intuitive understanding of consciousness 3) is objective: you can say whether some group of atoms (like brain) is conscious or not.
I think this claim is just confusing descriptive and normative ethics. Probably the most common confusion about ethics there is.
True, descriptive ethics is almost entirely composed of various facts about human psychology and sociology, but no normative claim can be deduced from these facts alone.
My view of ethics is that it's basically just a (often vague) set of principles in our minds. Some of ethics is in our genes, some of it is cultural. Different cultures may have different ethical principles. Fundamentally, it's about feelings – something is good, because it feels good.
>Content of consciousness is the only thing that we can be sure of. Let's say I'm scared. This fact is true no matter if I'm in a dream or hallucinating.
Explanations of many of the questions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_p...
What do professional philosophers believe, and why? http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professiona...
Here's a list of links to more discussions: http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420 I haven't actually gone through these, though.
You might also want to check out:
Survey of eating habits among philosophers: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...
Survey of beliefs among economists: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists...