I’m currently studying as a philosophy undergrad and I sympathise with some of this. But I like to chalk it up a little differently.
I tend to lean more towards the realist side of things in general, but I think when it comes to whether philosophy matters in different ways, I think there are a few things to say.
I think many aspects of philosophy are simply attempts to understand reality, and in such a way that is the least offensive to our intuitions-understood as intellectual presentations rather than a gut feeling.
But some of the time I can find myself not really caring for some answers to philosophical questions. I think there is one true theory of time, but unless it has implications that matter (which seems entrenched in philosophical investigation) then I remain cold to possible theories. I’d rather do something else tbh!
But this strikes me as the same problem almost everything else faces. I don’t care much for professional sport, so I don’t involve myself with it. But it would be a bit of overreaching on my part if I were to conclude that professional sport was useless or a waste of time. (Though of course, you’re not arguing for this sort of conclusion for philosophy. But I do think it’s important to keep in mind.)
Another possible answer is that there are normative truths “out there” and it’s important to understand what they are so we can coincide with the reasons that apply to us. Case in point, things like objective epistemic and moral facts.
But I think one of the reasons why I champion philosophy over all the other areas of inquiry is that it’s the foundation for everything-all other areas of inquiry. And that’s pretty awesome.
In the end, I also just enjoy possessing a mind capable of having clarity. And I feel my study of philosophy has really helped me to achieve this state of affairs. Though I will say that you don’t have to study at an institution to reach this. Just engaging with philosophy on your own can do this-especially in the writing of your own philosophical ideas and arguments. I feel philosophy is especially equipped for this use provided that it’s the discipline that is built upon the making of arguments and the exploration of complex ideas in tandem.
Thank you for reading my impromptu essay. I hope I get a passing grade 🤞
Yeah that's insightful, there are definitely parts of philosophy (and other areas of study) where, even though there's no doubt a real answer, it still doesn't capture my interest, perhaps because as you say, it's so far removed from something that could apply to us.
I think this is the same as a point Unger makes, that parts of philosophy are "analytically empty", arguing about distinctions have gone through so many iterations of "idea -> counterexample" that they've become untethered from real problems.
On the other hand, something like the nature of time does matter--if you care about fundamental physics. Personally, I don't have the background to get a good grasp on that, which is yet another reason I sometimes don't find a question interesting!
Interesting essay! I’m actually going the opposite way to you (Neuroscience BSc, about to start MA in Philosophy), mostly due to my interest in the philosophy of mind but also because of questions like this that I don’t have answers to - best of luck in the future, subscribing to read more like this :)
Good luck! It was my interest in philosophy of mind that made me decide to go into cognitive/neuroscience (and I'm glad I've studied both the philosophy side and science side)
I like your example of a debate about the meaning of death, as it well illustrates the slippery slope leading from a discussion of a particular topic to the twin notions that what ultimately matters is having a precise definition of the name we give to the phenomenon under discussion, and that the way to reach that definition is to box it in with increasingly tight corner cases. Lurking beneath the surface, I suspect, is a yearning for an ideal language allowing only the expression of error-free concepts.
In a nutshell, I get the impression that analytic philosophers expect that refining definitions will yield knowledge, while pragmatists expect that refining knowledge will yield definitions.
In addition to clarifying concepts, it seems like philosophy is good for exploring the space of possibilities, of coming up with new hypotheses. To be sure, a lot of it is nonsense, but there's widespread disagreement about which parts are nonsense and which are promising. We also can't know what might make a difference in the future.
When Einstein and collaborators put out their landmark EPR paper identifying what Schrodinger would later call "quantum entanglement", they were criticized for metaphysical navel gazing. Three decades later, John Bell figured out a way to test their proposition, and just a few years ago three physicists won the Nobel for doing so. Something to remember when people say something is untestable in principle.
Yeah I agree with philosophy as a way of coming up with new hypotheses--if you can see the concepts clearly, you can see different ways they can be put together. Dennett's work on the intentional stance was a big inspiration for the later psychological/developmental work on theory of mind. Lots of examples of philosophy inspiring fruitful work (even outside of the physics examples I give in the article or you mention in your comment).
I think your points about conceptual analysis are spot on! Though I don't think issues like material composition are non-issues in the same sense (perhaps I'm misreading you and you weren't intending to argue that). For example, which view of material composition is correct will determine whether, e.g., physical objects are infinitely divisible or not (I also think it might have relevance for questions in philosophy of mind as Unger (and others) has argued). It's of course a perfectly valid stance to just not care about these questions, and unless you have some intrinsic interest in these issues I think you should just not bother with them. Still, I also think that they really are substantive issues, unlike what the correct definition of "death" is.
I guess it depends on how broadly you're defining issues in material composition. I don't think we're going to answer questions about fundamental physics by discussing the ship of theseus or Lump and David--those seem extremely analogous to the death question to me, talking about fuzzy psychological constructs as if there needs to be a sharp boundary. But I do agree there's an interesting question that can be asked about how divisible matter is--and discussions of that should be informed by our best understanding of matter (e.g. fundamental physics).
Maybe I'm wrong and you can point out why the classic discussions as outlined in the SEP on the issue (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/) are actually important for our understanding of physics! I haven't seen such an explanation, though.
I agree that settling material composition probably won't do anything to answer questions in fundamental physics, but then I also don't think that all substantive issues are such that settling them will help answer questions in fundamental physics. If your claim is just that material composition doesn't do that, then I'm all on board, but I took you to be making a broader claim that there is no substantive issue here whatsoever, and that I think is false.
(I do think they might influence each other a little, but probably mostly physics influencing mereology, rather than the other way. This doesn't mean that physics just automatically settles the issue, and mereology is useless (for answering mereological--it might be practically useless lol), but rather that certain empirical evidence bears on the issues, while still leaving it underdetermined.)
I share your sense that talk of composite objects is ill-formed and arbitrary, but I just take that to be a reason in favor of a certain position (nihilism). I don't infer that the topic is a non-issue due to it bearing on certain questions that (while not necessarily relevant for fundamental physics) seem obviously genuine and substantive. I gave the example of whether or not the world is (possibly) made of gunk. This seems clearly to me to be a genuine question with a true or false answer, and which theory of mereology is true will have implications for which answer you can give (and vice versa).
I also alluded to it bearing on philosophy of mind. To directly address your last paragraph, this might be seen as a corollary of the problem of the many, which is mentioned in the article you link (though only in parentheses, lol). Let my try to lay it out very quickly:
The idea is simply that if you're a physicalist about the mind, there is a puzzle of whether you have very many nested consciousnesses "in" your brain. This is easiest to spell out on identity theory: Take whatever part of your brain is conscious. This object would plausibly remain conscious, were you to remove some arbitrarily small amount of stuff from it. But that resulting object was already there before you removed the stuff, so were there two consciousnesses there all along?
Functionalism faces a parallel worry, even if it doesn't talk in terms of physical objects. Take the functions instantiated by your brain. Now consider the functions instantiated by your brain minus a little stuff. Surely that would still be sufficient for consciousness, but that is simply a proper part of the larger system. Hence we have to say something about how functional systems are individuated and "compose" to say something about this problem.
It should be clear how mereology bears on this. With the identity theory case, how many objects there are *there* (points at your brain) will depend on what the rules for material composition are, and you will need certain views (probably some specific sort of restricted composition thesis) to avoid the problem (at least that would be one route for escaping the problem.
it is less clear for functionalism, as it doesn't explicitly reference objects themselves. However there will be an analogous question of "functional composition" that appears as non-substantive as material composition. On top of this, one possible route out of the problem for a functionalist would be to say that for a functional state to be conscious, it must be a state of a (real) physical object. Combining this with some restricted composition thesis would avoid the problem.
This problem of course rests on certain assumptions that you might or might not accept, but I at least hope that it clarifies how questions of material composition might affect genuine questions (and hence themselves be genuine questions).
The example you gave was of matter being infinitely divisible or not. That's a question of fundamental physics and was what I was responding to. Was there more to the suggestion I'm missing?
In terms of philosophy of mind, I don't agree that talking in the abstract about one sort of thing (statues and clay) can inform you on how much you can take away while keeping some conscious function, for the same reason I don't think talking in the abstract about the ship of Theseus could tell me which wires in my computer I could safely remove and still get it to play minesweeper
What I meant was simply the question of whether the world is gunky or not--i.e. whether it consists of indivisible simples, or infinitely divisible gunk. As I said in the big parenthesis, physics might very well make discoveries that bear on this issue--e.g. it might find what appears to be something indivisible, or whatever. Still, any empirical evidence will underdetermine the issue, and what we say about mereology bears on what we say about it, and vice versa.
The philosophy of mind thing was not about how much you can take away while keeping conscious function. Rather it was a question of whether there might be many overlapping consciousnesses "within" a single brain.
Can you give me an example of how philosophy, without being informed by theoretical physics, would answer a question about whether something is infinitely divisible or not? I'm having a hard time seeing how this isn't theoretical physics. I would expect the answer in terms of forces and fields, and I don't know how you would get at that thinking about statues and clay.
For the consciousness question, to the extent there's an interesting question there personally I think it's bound up with the conceptual tangle of consciousness rather than anything else
TY for this. You've probably written about this before (sorry!) but do you know / know of Joshua Greene? I ask 'cuz of the philo-neuro move. Greene is on a recent "Lives Well Lived" podcast (Peter Singer and Kasia [something]). Good stuff.
I loved this. I am maybe being a little petty but many philosophical squabbles on Substack annoys me to death (and we come back to what is death?). From a psychologist point of view, they seem to come from not appreciating the pragmatism of accepting something that is good enough for a never-ending search for the Perfect (definition, conceptualization, morality, or whatever).
I think with your whole death discussion you're pointing towards something really interesting about language and terminology in general.
Maybe it's just me coming more from a 'data science' background where fuzziness is not only probable but expected. Nothing ever is precise and exact besides in theoretical work, and I feel like that's a harder pill to swallow than it's supposed to be.
If I want to refer to anything physical, I have to accept a certain degree of approximation and abstraction. As you try to approach a better and better description, the information needed for it approaches the information contained in the object itself. So the only best "description" of a physical object is the object in itself; otherwise, we leave enough space for interpretability that we'll get to some weird debates like your example of death and needing a full temporal analysis (until the end of time?) to define the term perfectly.
Yeah I like that articulation. I think data science gives a lot of useful ways of thinking about these kinds of things--if you've trained a lot of classifiers, it's a useful lens to take to a lot of debates in philosophy (e.g. Sorites paradox about taking a single grain of sand not being enough to turn a heap into a non-heap). I wonder how much my data science background has affected my thinking on this stuff rather than the cognitive science.
I kind of had a hint about your background based on the way you write (and my familiarity with some concepts you've presented or ways of explaining things) XD.
But the Sorites paradox (and similarly, the Abelian sandpile model) has quite some interesting things to say about the idea of emergent properties, especially in language itself (and also again, a concept quite familiar to anybody who worked in data science).
And about how we never really grow out of the playing-with-sand phase I guess.
Agree. When I read philo sunstack, I find lots of energy being put into highly conceptual debates, often abstracted to the point of near nonsense.
Just the other day (the otherwise pretty cool) Amos Wollen was having a whole discussion about what a property is, and using the example of the redness of a rose. Yet it seems to me that, to understand the redness of a rose, the relevant questions have little to do with platonic universals, and more with things like the rich ecosystem in which both the rose's wild ancestor, its pollinators, and us humans, arose together, and how we ended up coordinating a bunch of interspecies information in reflected sunlight, projected across the response curves of our various cone cells!
Unrelated to this, but Exurb1a had a cool concept in one of his book (5th Science, if I remember correctly) where they had some type of quantum transportation devices. But as they would practically be faster than light and violate all kinds of laws, they would only work if they would never break ever in the future, so in a way, by the fact that a certain machine is working, you know it will never be destroyed (or if it didn't work from the beginning, it might have meant that at one point in the future it will break, so the machine started to never work retroactively)
I was kind of reminded of this after your death example, where we would need to consider any future technologies in order to properly define the term
Thanks so much for pointing me to that essay, I'm not familiar with Macdonald but the view as outlined there is one I have a lot of sympathy for (though I'm not sure I see it as encompassing all of philosophy, as it's portrayed in the article).
Wordle and identity traps, right here. I connect 100 percent. I built a whole life around roles and categories that eventually felt like cages. The Ship of Theseus wasn’t just a thought experiment for me. It was my life. I kept replacing parts of myself until I barely recognized the whole.
But I stepped away. I left the corporate grind, packed light, and started slow traveling with my partner. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.
I wrote a bit about that shift here if you’re curious:
Now that “natural philosophy” has become science, in a technical sense philosophy has been left with three basic topics. Metaphysics involves what ultimately exists, epistemology involves our attempts to grasp how things work, and axiology involves what’s good. Furthermore most philosophers seem quite adamant that no agreed upon solutions can ever be reached regarding these matters, and perhaps somewhat to deflect criticism that their studies have been a waste of time. So it’s effectively more of an art to potentially appreciate rather than a science from which to figure things out.
My issue with all this is that I think science itself remains flawed specifically because it’s in need of useful principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology, and especially in its weakest areas. So while I’d permit philosophy to remain an art forever, I believe that a new community must rise up whose only purpose would be to achieve various agreed upon principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to found science in general. I’d call these people “meta scientists”. In effect I suspect that several groups would compete to achieve such a distinction, with the ones whose principles help science advance most to generally become most influential.
I bet you’d enjoy this turn of events Tommy, though it might be wise to say nothing on the matter for now. This would be wickedly destabilizing and controversial!
I recognise all the issues you discuss. I believe they arise from the approach academic philosophers generally take to philosophy, which renders the subject largely incomprehensible and of little use. They are then left to merely squabble over minor details and add further footnotes to Plato,. This gives the impression that philosophy is mere word-play, a language game that cannot be won. I do not believe this is a sensible way to do philosophy, but it's the industry standard and baked into the system. One can become a tenured professor and still be unable to understand metaphysics, just as long as one is able to endlessly and eloquently complicate the issues.
I think the fact that you can't see the usefulness of certain discussions doesn't say much about the discussions as much as it says about your proclivity and how you should maybe spend your time. I love philosophy, but I was more interested in understanding how people interacted with each other through concepts/according to their appraisal of them, and that led me to sociology.
This is just my perspective, and it might be argued to be some form of wordplay as well, but I strongly believe the only way to navigate the non-linear complexity of life is believing that nothing is wasted. Everything has a reason and a purpose, even if it's elusive to me.
I don't think not seeing usefulness in certain discussions necessarily says something specific about the discussions. But I think certain features of a discussion (e.g. it being arguing about the boundaries of a concept that inherently has fuzzy boundaries) can lead it to not being interesting to me.
Yes, hence why I said this is more about you than about the topics and discussions themselves. If anything, this text reveals your affinity for certain types of doing and thinking about things, which explains the path you have chosen to follow. It is not intrinsically bad nor good, it is a perspective, it might help others realise their own proclivity as well.
There was one time when a whole group of philosophers left their armchairs and made a great impact. They treated Nature as a cipher and they tried to break it. They succeeded. As a result philosophy of nature became science. Who were these philosophers? The founding members of the Royal Society.
Your text is highly thought-provoking, but I’m left with the sense that you underestimate how much your reflection is itself a product of philosophical practice. By attributing the relevance of concepts and intuitions to psychology and philosophy, you reinforce the pragmatic nature of your view of knowledge. However, when addressing paradoxes of material constitution, like the Ship of Theseus, your historical references seem limited, overlooking contributions like Kant’s to modern science, for instance (something he achieved without leaving the “armchair”). Curiously, your deflationary view, which treats concepts as psychological constructs, echoes aspects of Kantian thought. You might argue here that I’m reinforcing your point . Still, your perspective is the result of a philosophical exercise, built with tools provided by philosophy itself. Don’t you think that, by stepping back a bit from your pragmatism and your deflationary view that philosophy is a game of words, and delving deeper into the historical and practical aspects of philosophical practice, we might conclude that philosophy’s tools allow us to rethink reality without empirical experiments, serving as a foundation for concrete advances?
Thank you for your thoughtful reply despite the impressions I mentioned about this piece. Actually, my intent wasn’t to counter your argument but highlight what struck me as an overly pragmatic view of philosophy, which led me to pose a question about its broader role. I look forward to reading your other article.
I’m currently studying as a philosophy undergrad and I sympathise with some of this. But I like to chalk it up a little differently.
I tend to lean more towards the realist side of things in general, but I think when it comes to whether philosophy matters in different ways, I think there are a few things to say.
I think many aspects of philosophy are simply attempts to understand reality, and in such a way that is the least offensive to our intuitions-understood as intellectual presentations rather than a gut feeling.
But some of the time I can find myself not really caring for some answers to philosophical questions. I think there is one true theory of time, but unless it has implications that matter (which seems entrenched in philosophical investigation) then I remain cold to possible theories. I’d rather do something else tbh!
But this strikes me as the same problem almost everything else faces. I don’t care much for professional sport, so I don’t involve myself with it. But it would be a bit of overreaching on my part if I were to conclude that professional sport was useless or a waste of time. (Though of course, you’re not arguing for this sort of conclusion for philosophy. But I do think it’s important to keep in mind.)
Another possible answer is that there are normative truths “out there” and it’s important to understand what they are so we can coincide with the reasons that apply to us. Case in point, things like objective epistemic and moral facts.
But I think one of the reasons why I champion philosophy over all the other areas of inquiry is that it’s the foundation for everything-all other areas of inquiry. And that’s pretty awesome.
In the end, I also just enjoy possessing a mind capable of having clarity. And I feel my study of philosophy has really helped me to achieve this state of affairs. Though I will say that you don’t have to study at an institution to reach this. Just engaging with philosophy on your own can do this-especially in the writing of your own philosophical ideas and arguments. I feel philosophy is especially equipped for this use provided that it’s the discipline that is built upon the making of arguments and the exploration of complex ideas in tandem.
Thank you for reading my impromptu essay. I hope I get a passing grade 🤞
Yeah that's insightful, there are definitely parts of philosophy (and other areas of study) where, even though there's no doubt a real answer, it still doesn't capture my interest, perhaps because as you say, it's so far removed from something that could apply to us.
I think this is the same as a point Unger makes, that parts of philosophy are "analytically empty", arguing about distinctions have gone through so many iterations of "idea -> counterexample" that they've become untethered from real problems.
On the other hand, something like the nature of time does matter--if you care about fundamental physics. Personally, I don't have the background to get a good grasp on that, which is yet another reason I sometimes don't find a question interesting!
Interesting essay! I’m actually going the opposite way to you (Neuroscience BSc, about to start MA in Philosophy), mostly due to my interest in the philosophy of mind but also because of questions like this that I don’t have answers to - best of luck in the future, subscribing to read more like this :)
Good luck! It was my interest in philosophy of mind that made me decide to go into cognitive/neuroscience (and I'm glad I've studied both the philosophy side and science side)
I like your example of a debate about the meaning of death, as it well illustrates the slippery slope leading from a discussion of a particular topic to the twin notions that what ultimately matters is having a precise definition of the name we give to the phenomenon under discussion, and that the way to reach that definition is to box it in with increasingly tight corner cases. Lurking beneath the surface, I suspect, is a yearning for an ideal language allowing only the expression of error-free concepts.
In a nutshell, I get the impression that analytic philosophers expect that refining definitions will yield knowledge, while pragmatists expect that refining knowledge will yield definitions.
In addition to clarifying concepts, it seems like philosophy is good for exploring the space of possibilities, of coming up with new hypotheses. To be sure, a lot of it is nonsense, but there's widespread disagreement about which parts are nonsense and which are promising. We also can't know what might make a difference in the future.
When Einstein and collaborators put out their landmark EPR paper identifying what Schrodinger would later call "quantum entanglement", they were criticized for metaphysical navel gazing. Three decades later, John Bell figured out a way to test their proposition, and just a few years ago three physicists won the Nobel for doing so. Something to remember when people say something is untestable in principle.
Yeah I agree with philosophy as a way of coming up with new hypotheses--if you can see the concepts clearly, you can see different ways they can be put together. Dennett's work on the intentional stance was a big inspiration for the later psychological/developmental work on theory of mind. Lots of examples of philosophy inspiring fruitful work (even outside of the physics examples I give in the article or you mention in your comment).
I think your points about conceptual analysis are spot on! Though I don't think issues like material composition are non-issues in the same sense (perhaps I'm misreading you and you weren't intending to argue that). For example, which view of material composition is correct will determine whether, e.g., physical objects are infinitely divisible or not (I also think it might have relevance for questions in philosophy of mind as Unger (and others) has argued). It's of course a perfectly valid stance to just not care about these questions, and unless you have some intrinsic interest in these issues I think you should just not bother with them. Still, I also think that they really are substantive issues, unlike what the correct definition of "death" is.
I guess it depends on how broadly you're defining issues in material composition. I don't think we're going to answer questions about fundamental physics by discussing the ship of theseus or Lump and David--those seem extremely analogous to the death question to me, talking about fuzzy psychological constructs as if there needs to be a sharp boundary. But I do agree there's an interesting question that can be asked about how divisible matter is--and discussions of that should be informed by our best understanding of matter (e.g. fundamental physics).
Maybe I'm wrong and you can point out why the classic discussions as outlined in the SEP on the issue (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/) are actually important for our understanding of physics! I haven't seen such an explanation, though.
I agree that settling material composition probably won't do anything to answer questions in fundamental physics, but then I also don't think that all substantive issues are such that settling them will help answer questions in fundamental physics. If your claim is just that material composition doesn't do that, then I'm all on board, but I took you to be making a broader claim that there is no substantive issue here whatsoever, and that I think is false.
(I do think they might influence each other a little, but probably mostly physics influencing mereology, rather than the other way. This doesn't mean that physics just automatically settles the issue, and mereology is useless (for answering mereological--it might be practically useless lol), but rather that certain empirical evidence bears on the issues, while still leaving it underdetermined.)
I share your sense that talk of composite objects is ill-formed and arbitrary, but I just take that to be a reason in favor of a certain position (nihilism). I don't infer that the topic is a non-issue due to it bearing on certain questions that (while not necessarily relevant for fundamental physics) seem obviously genuine and substantive. I gave the example of whether or not the world is (possibly) made of gunk. This seems clearly to me to be a genuine question with a true or false answer, and which theory of mereology is true will have implications for which answer you can give (and vice versa).
I also alluded to it bearing on philosophy of mind. To directly address your last paragraph, this might be seen as a corollary of the problem of the many, which is mentioned in the article you link (though only in parentheses, lol). Let my try to lay it out very quickly:
The idea is simply that if you're a physicalist about the mind, there is a puzzle of whether you have very many nested consciousnesses "in" your brain. This is easiest to spell out on identity theory: Take whatever part of your brain is conscious. This object would plausibly remain conscious, were you to remove some arbitrarily small amount of stuff from it. But that resulting object was already there before you removed the stuff, so were there two consciousnesses there all along?
Functionalism faces a parallel worry, even if it doesn't talk in terms of physical objects. Take the functions instantiated by your brain. Now consider the functions instantiated by your brain minus a little stuff. Surely that would still be sufficient for consciousness, but that is simply a proper part of the larger system. Hence we have to say something about how functional systems are individuated and "compose" to say something about this problem.
It should be clear how mereology bears on this. With the identity theory case, how many objects there are *there* (points at your brain) will depend on what the rules for material composition are, and you will need certain views (probably some specific sort of restricted composition thesis) to avoid the problem (at least that would be one route for escaping the problem.
it is less clear for functionalism, as it doesn't explicitly reference objects themselves. However there will be an analogous question of "functional composition" that appears as non-substantive as material composition. On top of this, one possible route out of the problem for a functionalist would be to say that for a functional state to be conscious, it must be a state of a (real) physical object. Combining this with some restricted composition thesis would avoid the problem.
This problem of course rests on certain assumptions that you might or might not accept, but I at least hope that it clarifies how questions of material composition might affect genuine questions (and hence themselves be genuine questions).
The example you gave was of matter being infinitely divisible or not. That's a question of fundamental physics and was what I was responding to. Was there more to the suggestion I'm missing?
In terms of philosophy of mind, I don't agree that talking in the abstract about one sort of thing (statues and clay) can inform you on how much you can take away while keeping some conscious function, for the same reason I don't think talking in the abstract about the ship of Theseus could tell me which wires in my computer I could safely remove and still get it to play minesweeper
What I meant was simply the question of whether the world is gunky or not--i.e. whether it consists of indivisible simples, or infinitely divisible gunk. As I said in the big parenthesis, physics might very well make discoveries that bear on this issue--e.g. it might find what appears to be something indivisible, or whatever. Still, any empirical evidence will underdetermine the issue, and what we say about mereology bears on what we say about it, and vice versa.
The philosophy of mind thing was not about how much you can take away while keeping conscious function. Rather it was a question of whether there might be many overlapping consciousnesses "within" a single brain.
Can you give me an example of how philosophy, without being informed by theoretical physics, would answer a question about whether something is infinitely divisible or not? I'm having a hard time seeing how this isn't theoretical physics. I would expect the answer in terms of forces and fields, and I don't know how you would get at that thinking about statues and clay.
For the consciousness question, to the extent there's an interesting question there personally I think it's bound up with the conceptual tangle of consciousness rather than anything else
Hey Tommy,
TY for this. You've probably written about this before (sorry!) but do you know / know of Joshua Greene? I ask 'cuz of the philo-neuro move. Greene is on a recent "Lives Well Lived" podcast (Peter Singer and Kasia [something]). Good stuff.
And if you want something more deflationary, check out y'day's post here: https://www.mattball.org/
;-)
Take care.
I don't know Josh personally, but saw him around while I was at Harvard
I loved this. I am maybe being a little petty but many philosophical squabbles on Substack annoys me to death (and we come back to what is death?). From a psychologist point of view, they seem to come from not appreciating the pragmatism of accepting something that is good enough for a never-ending search for the Perfect (definition, conceptualization, morality, or whatever).
This essay might have been my sneaky way of taking a jab at those exact discussions without actually entering the fray.
Great jab 😄
That was a nice read!
I think with your whole death discussion you're pointing towards something really interesting about language and terminology in general.
Maybe it's just me coming more from a 'data science' background where fuzziness is not only probable but expected. Nothing ever is precise and exact besides in theoretical work, and I feel like that's a harder pill to swallow than it's supposed to be.
If I want to refer to anything physical, I have to accept a certain degree of approximation and abstraction. As you try to approach a better and better description, the information needed for it approaches the information contained in the object itself. So the only best "description" of a physical object is the object in itself; otherwise, we leave enough space for interpretability that we'll get to some weird debates like your example of death and needing a full temporal analysis (until the end of time?) to define the term perfectly.
Yeah I like that articulation. I think data science gives a lot of useful ways of thinking about these kinds of things--if you've trained a lot of classifiers, it's a useful lens to take to a lot of debates in philosophy (e.g. Sorites paradox about taking a single grain of sand not being enough to turn a heap into a non-heap). I wonder how much my data science background has affected my thinking on this stuff rather than the cognitive science.
I kind of had a hint about your background based on the way you write (and my familiarity with some concepts you've presented or ways of explaining things) XD.
But the Sorites paradox (and similarly, the Abelian sandpile model) has quite some interesting things to say about the idea of emergent properties, especially in language itself (and also again, a concept quite familiar to anybody who worked in data science).
And about how we never really grow out of the playing-with-sand phase I guess.
Agree. When I read philo sunstack, I find lots of energy being put into highly conceptual debates, often abstracted to the point of near nonsense.
Just the other day (the otherwise pretty cool) Amos Wollen was having a whole discussion about what a property is, and using the example of the redness of a rose. Yet it seems to me that, to understand the redness of a rose, the relevant questions have little to do with platonic universals, and more with things like the rich ecosystem in which both the rose's wild ancestor, its pollinators, and us humans, arose together, and how we ended up coordinating a bunch of interspecies information in reflected sunlight, projected across the response curves of our various cone cells!
Unrelated to this, but Exurb1a had a cool concept in one of his book (5th Science, if I remember correctly) where they had some type of quantum transportation devices. But as they would practically be faster than light and violate all kinds of laws, they would only work if they would never break ever in the future, so in a way, by the fact that a certain machine is working, you know it will never be destroyed (or if it didn't work from the beginning, it might have meant that at one point in the future it will break, so the machine started to never work retroactively)
I was kind of reminded of this after your death example, where we would need to consider any future technologies in order to properly define the term
Yeah, I've read Fifth Science! Interesting book
Your stimulating post reminded me of this wonderful essay https://aeon.co/essays/philosophical-theories-are-like-good-stories-margaret-macdonald
Thanks so much for pointing me to that essay, I'm not familiar with Macdonald but the view as outlined there is one I have a lot of sympathy for (though I'm not sure I see it as encompassing all of philosophy, as it's portrayed in the article).
Wordle and identity traps, right here. I connect 100 percent. I built a whole life around roles and categories that eventually felt like cages. The Ship of Theseus wasn’t just a thought experiment for me. It was my life. I kept replacing parts of myself until I barely recognized the whole.
But I stepped away. I left the corporate grind, packed light, and started slow traveling with my partner. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.
I wrote a bit about that shift here if you’re curious:
https://thebenthalls.substack.com/p/retired-roaming-and-rooted-welcome
Thank you for making philosophy feel alive again. Your writing invites people in. Not just into the room, but into the mirror.
Now that “natural philosophy” has become science, in a technical sense philosophy has been left with three basic topics. Metaphysics involves what ultimately exists, epistemology involves our attempts to grasp how things work, and axiology involves what’s good. Furthermore most philosophers seem quite adamant that no agreed upon solutions can ever be reached regarding these matters, and perhaps somewhat to deflect criticism that their studies have been a waste of time. So it’s effectively more of an art to potentially appreciate rather than a science from which to figure things out.
My issue with all this is that I think science itself remains flawed specifically because it’s in need of useful principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology, and especially in its weakest areas. So while I’d permit philosophy to remain an art forever, I believe that a new community must rise up whose only purpose would be to achieve various agreed upon principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to found science in general. I’d call these people “meta scientists”. In effect I suspect that several groups would compete to achieve such a distinction, with the ones whose principles help science advance most to generally become most influential.
I bet you’d enjoy this turn of events Tommy, though it might be wise to say nothing on the matter for now. This would be wickedly destabilizing and controversial!
I recognise all the issues you discuss. I believe they arise from the approach academic philosophers generally take to philosophy, which renders the subject largely incomprehensible and of little use. They are then left to merely squabble over minor details and add further footnotes to Plato,. This gives the impression that philosophy is mere word-play, a language game that cannot be won. I do not believe this is a sensible way to do philosophy, but it's the industry standard and baked into the system. One can become a tenured professor and still be unable to understand metaphysics, just as long as one is able to endlessly and eloquently complicate the issues.
I think the fact that you can't see the usefulness of certain discussions doesn't say much about the discussions as much as it says about your proclivity and how you should maybe spend your time. I love philosophy, but I was more interested in understanding how people interacted with each other through concepts/according to their appraisal of them, and that led me to sociology.
This is just my perspective, and it might be argued to be some form of wordplay as well, but I strongly believe the only way to navigate the non-linear complexity of life is believing that nothing is wasted. Everything has a reason and a purpose, even if it's elusive to me.
I don't think not seeing usefulness in certain discussions necessarily says something specific about the discussions. But I think certain features of a discussion (e.g. it being arguing about the boundaries of a concept that inherently has fuzzy boundaries) can lead it to not being interesting to me.
Yes, hence why I said this is more about you than about the topics and discussions themselves. If anything, this text reveals your affinity for certain types of doing and thinking about things, which explains the path you have chosen to follow. It is not intrinsically bad nor good, it is a perspective, it might help others realise their own proclivity as well.
Here's my take on philosophy: https://ashstuart.substack.com/p/tecc-23-daring-to-ask-crafting-curiositys-compass
There was one time when a whole group of philosophers left their armchairs and made a great impact. They treated Nature as a cipher and they tried to break it. They succeeded. As a result philosophy of nature became science. Who were these philosophers? The founding members of the Royal Society.
Your text is highly thought-provoking, but I’m left with the sense that you underestimate how much your reflection is itself a product of philosophical practice. By attributing the relevance of concepts and intuitions to psychology and philosophy, you reinforce the pragmatic nature of your view of knowledge. However, when addressing paradoxes of material constitution, like the Ship of Theseus, your historical references seem limited, overlooking contributions like Kant’s to modern science, for instance (something he achieved without leaving the “armchair”). Curiously, your deflationary view, which treats concepts as psychological constructs, echoes aspects of Kantian thought. You might argue here that I’m reinforcing your point . Still, your perspective is the result of a philosophical exercise, built with tools provided by philosophy itself. Don’t you think that, by stepping back a bit from your pragmatism and your deflationary view that philosophy is a game of words, and delving deeper into the historical and practical aspects of philosophical practice, we might conclude that philosophy’s tools allow us to rethink reality without empirical experiments, serving as a foundation for concrete advances?
To be clear, the article is not claiming all philosophy is useless, so the "isn't this philosophy" objection doesn't seem appropriate.
I'm well aware of the contributions philosophy has made historically, and have written about some of that here: https://open.substack.com/pub/cognitivewonderland/p/science-is-philosophy
More generally, saying "some x does not lead to universal truths about the nature of reality" is not the same as saying "all x is useless"
Thank you for your thoughtful reply despite the impressions I mentioned about this piece. Actually, my intent wasn’t to counter your argument but highlight what struck me as an overly pragmatic view of philosophy, which led me to pose a question about its broader role. I look forward to reading your other article.