My Journey Into Philosophy (And Back Out)
A biographical post about my relationship with philosophy
Finding philosophy
I was a terrible high school student.
My grades were okay, but I clearly wasn't vying for Valedictorian. I was more interested in video games than academics. I finished my homework during lectures so I didn't waste my precious free time at home.
My mom didn't expect me to finish a university degree. She assumed I would go to a vocational school for something computer-related (I'm not sure my parents realized playing video games on a computer doesn't make one a computer whiz).
As a cocksure teenager, I saw myself as "above" school. I thought I was too smart for my classes. My image as a smart kid wasn't tied to academics—if anything, showing that I didn't try in class was more important. If I didn't try, the outcome of my grades weren't indicative of my intelligence so I couldn't be judged or compared.
When I hit puberty, my voice seemingly dropped two octaves overnight. I went from being mistaken for my sister when I picked up the phone to being mistaken for my dad. This gave me an idea: I could call my high school, pretend to be my dad, and say I was sick to get excused from school.
It worked. My school attendance plunged.
Being a nerd with a need to be seen as smart, I spent most of my skipped school time at the bookstore.
One fateful day at the bookstore, I picked up The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law. Philosophy seemed like a Smart Person Thing to be interested in.
It's no exaggeration to say that book changed the trajectory of my life.
The Philosophy Gym is a fun introduction to philosophy, going through 25 different playful dialogues arguing both sides of philosophical issues. It touched on everything from the existence of God to consciousness to objectivity in aesthetics.
I devoured that book and wanted more. This was shortly after I started seriously questioning my religion. Philosophy let me grapple with the gaps left by removing religion from my worldview. There weren't philosophy classes in my high school, though, so the bookstore became my focus.
I found myself drawn to philosophy of mind. The mind seemed fundamental and mysterious. Souls made little sense to me as an explanation for the mind, but I wasn't sure what fit in their place. I picked up books like Searle's Mind and Susan Blackmore's Consciousness.
When it came time to apply to university programs, I told my parents I wanted to study philosophy. I figured I would major in philosophy, get a teaching degree, and be a high school teacher (I considered high school teachers the smartest people I knew, despite me skipping their classes constantly).
My dad, a principal, told me what he thought of that: "No one will hire you."
I compromised. I was good at math and coding, so I applied to computer science programs.
I ended up attending the University of Waterloo for computer science (and minoring in philosophy). If Crunchbase can be trusted,
(the CEO of Substack) was the same year as me—but he was a dirty engineering student while I was an esteemed CS student, so we never interacted.Enter cognitive science
I was a terrible undergraduate student.
I had a lot of trouble with traditional teaching methods. I found it impossible to pay attention to a lecture for over 30 minutes. In retrospect, I wonder if I had (have?) some kind of attentional deficit. On the other hand, lectures are slow, boring, and a terrible way to learn, so not paying attention to them seems perfectly rational.
Professors didn't take attendance, so I frequently skipped. I didn't even have to make a call pretending to be my dad to excuse myself. I attended exactly one lecture of my linear algebra class in my second semester.
But I always attended my philosophy classes.
Towards the end of my first year, I decided I wanted to pursue a philosophy graduate degree. I figured as long as I completed my computer science degree, I could fall back on that for employment, so I should take a shot at this philosophy thing.
I talked to one of my professors about my interests and the possibility of grad school, and he mentioned I should check out Paul Thagard, the biggest name philosopher at our school.
Paul Thagard is a philosopher of cognitive science. He ran the cognitive science program and took a very science-informed approach to philosophy. After completing his PhD in philosophy, he went back and did a Master's in computer science so he could build computational models of cognition. What a Chad.
Thagard became a hero to me. Along with my nerdy philosophy reading, I was also reading science. I found myself drawn to philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, who talked about scientific fields related to their areas in philosophy. Thagard was interested in the mind and connected philosophy and science. He exemplified exactly what I wanted to move towards.
The university had an undergraduate "Cognitive Science Option" that Thagard administered. I wasn't (and still am not) sure what an "Option" is, but (spoiler) it's on my undergraduate degree alongside my major and minor. I was surprised to find that between the philosophy and computer science classes I planned to take, I would meet the requirements if I just added a couple of psychology classes.
One of the courses was Introduction to Cognitive Science. It introduced me to the idea of "typicality" in our concepts. For example, some spoons (large wooden or small metal ones) are more "typical" than others (like small wooden or large metal ones). There was something profound in realizing our concepts aren't rigid definitions—this is what I've been trying to articulate in the past four articles.
In my third year, I took a seminar on consciousness with Thagard. I learned a lot not only about consciousness, but also about how to think about philosophy. Thagard encouraged me to be skeptical of intuitions. Much of experimental philosophy undermined the universality of intuitions, so bald-faced appeals to intuitions shouldn't be taken as significant arguments.
Talking to graduate students about consciousness and learning from Thagard with his interdisciplinary leanings, it felt like I had found my place.
The Cracks Appear
In my final year as an undergraduate, I took a course on epistemology (the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge).
The class was all about what knowledge is. Parts of it were fun, but I felt like something was missing.
Finally one day, I asked the professor: "Is anyone in epistemology using developmental psychology to address these questions?" It just felt like the obvious thing to incorporate. If we're interested in what knowledge is, surely seeing how children develop to acquire knowledge would be helpful.
The professor's answer was disappointing: She didn't know of any.
I didn't really digest the significance of this. I was in my last year and had to figure out what came next. I applied to the Master's program in philosophy at the University of Waterloo.
I got in.
Though there were some highlights to my time there, many of my experiences raised the same concerns as my undergraduate epistemology class.
I had to take a "norms of assertion" seminar. The basic question of the course was: When is it "permissible" to assert something? Assertions are fact-based statements (like, "the sky is blue"). The class was all about whether you had to "know" something to assert it (the "knowledge norm of assertion").
In the first class, I had two questions: 1. Why would we assume there is a single rule governing this that applies in all cultural contexts and all people share? And 2. Why don't we collect some cross-cultural data to see under what circumstances people think it's okay to assert?
I never got answers to these questions. There is experimental philosophy on norms of assertion (interestingly, some done by the professor of that seminar after I took that course. It's unlikely I was an influence there, but it's fun to think I was). We didn't read any in the seminar, it was a bit of a side-show to the meat of the conversation: trying to sort out the moral sensibilities of sequestered Western academic philosophers towards one specific speech act.
It felt a bit like arguing about the proper ordering of cutlery when setting the table. Maybe you can say something sensible about why a particular arrangement works best in many circumstances in our culture, but it's not worth writing books arguing about the one true way to put a fork on a table. It felt so small and superficial compared to the big foundational questions I thought philosophy was supposed to be about.
Increasingly, the seminars I took and the talks I went to felt full of empty ideas. People marshaled their arguments based on their personal intuitions, ignoring that many questions could be answered (or at least enriched) by going out and collecting some data.
There was a lot of lip service paid to science. But no one actually pursued science. When I cited an evolution textbook for a minor point in one paper, that was seen far enough outside the norm to be noteworthy by the professor.
When it came time to figure out what to do next, I couldn't get excited about philosophy PhD programs. I was still excited about philosophical questions, but I wasn't excited about trying to answer them within a philosophy department. It felt like the tools and approaches there were stifling.
Instead, I only applied to neuroscience and psychology programs.
That surprised my peers. They asked if I was worried about switching to the sciences. It would require different skills. There was a real risk of failure. That's when I realized: science intimidated them. They didn't incorporate it into their philosophical thinking because they weren't comfortable with it. There's something sad about this—they had many of the same questions about the world as I did, but had limited what they could draw on to answer those questions.
I realized this was not my tribe.
The Aftermath
I was a great PhD student.
I landed in a neuroscience program studying decision-making. Studying science was useful. It gave me new ways of thinking and new knowledge to apply to my philosophical questions. I published a lot of cool papers and achieved things I'm still proud of—but that's a whole other story.
That said, it's hard to do experiments that feel central to philosophical questions. Eventually (after completing a PhD and postdoc), I left science and academics altogether.
That's where the story picks up here. I still have a deep love of philosophy. My bookshelf is full of books by philosophers. But I find it much easier to be positive about philosophy now that I'm not in a philosophy department. Even if a good portion of the field is full of empty ideas, there's also an enormous amount of insightful work, and being outside of a department allows me to more easily pick the good stuff.
Cognitive Wonderland is my attempt to get back to those questions that sparked my interest all those years ago when I was skipping school. It's fitting that the questions sparked by me skipping school are best pursued now that I'm completely out of academics.
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When philosophers try to use philosophical methods to answer scientific questions it often feels nitpicky or vague. When scientists try to answer philosophical questions by way of the scientific method it feels reductive.
I think we need both approaches, but scientists and philosophers need to be willing to accept the limitations of their own methods.
I had a somewhat similar intellectual journey in undergrad, majoring in cognitive science. I've liked philosophy since around the end of highschool, but have for awhile suspected that mapping intuitions through psychological/experimental methods was the thing philosophers really needed to do. I went for cog sci partly for this reason, and for the hope that the philosophy classes might still be insightful.
But philosophy of mind was basically exactly what I feared it to be, in the extreme. Dumb, interminable josteling over intuitions disguised as logical thought.
The happy side of this is that I eventually got to reading (and understanding) Parfit's population ethics and got a sense of renewed hope that the arm chair intuition-wrangeling that I liked could be still important.