Oxford announces new degree in Computer Science and Philosophy
comlab.ox.ac.uk
comlab.ox.ac.uk
As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately, the philosophy course seemed deeply rooted in classical theories like dualism (which I think of as a rationalization for religious dogma), ignoring any and all modern advances in neuroscience. The final straw was the lecture unit on "artificial minds". There was a lot of uninformed speculation about AI, which really disappointed me. The professor (and textbooks) completely ignored beautiful advances like Godel's theorem, which would make a great foundation for philosophizing about axiomatic "minds". I tried to speak up about what AI really is, even tried bringing Russell/Norvig into class, but I don't know if it was the professor or the students who were more resistant to facts clogging up the debate.
Anyway, I have nothing against philosophers, and I believe that they are an important part of the intellectual framework of academia. However, in inter-disciplinary cases like this, I really hope that they get people that can successfully straddle both sides of the divide. Stephen Hawking's quote in his new book comes to mind. I don't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines that a lot (not all, naturally) of philosophers have closed themselves off to science and thus denied themselves access to the greatest intellectual developments of the 20th century.
I could fill an essay myself in response to Paul's post but I'll keep it brief so as not to bore anyone.
This: "Philosophy doesn't really have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various individual philosophers have said about different topics over the years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered."
The subject matter of philosophy is the world of abstract ideas. Some call them universals, they are to be contrasted with cold hard facts, stuff we can reason scientifically about. It is not that "few were sufficiently correct" but rather (as Kant for one pointed out) that metaphysical claims like the famous "Gods exists" or the "universe is infinite" can be asserted to be true while at the same time there opposite can be asserted to be true! "God does not exist". "The universe is finite". Now, does that make everyone wrong? No, of course not, a wiser person just digs deeper.
And this: "But did studying logic teach me the importance of thinking this way, or make me any better at it? I don't know."
The thing is, as I've come to realize (from thinking about it long and hard!) is that logic is not a part of philosophy. Yes they go hand-in-hand but logic is really a cross-disciplinary tool with applications in many disciplines, mathematics, computer science, philosophy and so on. Just because it has traditionally been very closely associated with philosophy can mislead us into thinking that logic is part of philosophy. And so to blame philosophy because learning logic didn't benefit you in the way you thought it would is a category error at the very least in my opinion.
I'll stop here but I have to say, I would love if Paul were a bit more humble and a bit less arrogant and realize that there's a reason philosophy is so difficult. It's not because it's all smoke and mirrors and sophistry - though there is some of that, and you need the mental tools to sort the wheat from the chaff. You know Richard Rorty has said that philosophy is merely a branch of literature! And he was one of the leading philosophical figures of the last century! Think about that for a moment...
Of course, this was York ("only" in the top ~10 UK unis), not Oxford (top 2-3).
It works the same way as when bootstrapping a computer, where you have to load a bunch of fake "operating systems" (e.g. BIOS, Grub, early stages of init daemon) before you can run the latest version of the "real" OS. And after that, you will still progress mostly by patches.
I was taught atomic theory chronologically starting with the plum pudding model, then rutherford's model, then Bohr's model and finally the quantum models.
At each stage, the focus was on:
* What observations led the scientists in question to propose the model? e.g. in Rutherford's case, there was an extensive discussion on the gold-foil experiment, the observations he saw, and the conclusions he drew from it (e.g. that a lot of mass must be packed into a tiny space).
* What properties follow from adopting them model? e.g. with Rutherford's model, the notion of an accelerating charged particle (electron) would mean that the electron would continuously lose energy until it crashes into the nucleus. obviously this isn't happening.
* Repeat the cycle: how did bohr's model attempt to overcome these problems.
We did the same with the theories on acids and bases: how Arrhenius' concept required the notion of liquid to be present, how Bronsted and Lowry formulated it more generally as proton donation and acceptance, and how Lewis formulated it in terms of electrons.
I like that at each step, we learned WHY these models were proposed and how they explained the phenomena seen until then. We learned WHAT the consequences of making a physical model are, and we learned WHAT new observations could not be accounted for. Then we learned about how concepts are generalized to account for more information.
In contrast, if I had just been shown a beautiful but complex model at the beginning, I'm not sure I would have learned as much or held as much interest. The difference is like seeing a very elegant proof to a problem vs seeing the different half-correct approaches culminating into a final solution. I feel that if the goal is to teach people how to think like scientists, show them the process not the final result.
While today I would appreciate it for what you point out, at the time, those lessons were lost on me, and I was a thoughtful kid. I think if the pedagogy were more oriented around the progess of the scientific method, it would have been fantastic.
It seemed misguided, though, in the context of a chemistry chapter on the nature of atoms. Let's also not fail to acknowledge that a gifted teacher can make all the difference in how a given approach might be, and I imagine that the more complex, contextual picture that respects that our understanding is still evolving would be superior in the hands of a gifted teacher.
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.ht... is really accurate.
If philosophy was taught the same way physics is, it would be utterly intractable.
Unlike physics, philosophy has little in the way of settled canon. There are precious few bits of established gained ground when it comes to the truly fundamental questions of a given area of philosophy.
At an entry level, the point of a proper philosophy education is to foster an appreciation for the big questions and for critical thinking.
From there, it is convenient to work historically as it provides both a natural progression of thinking on the topics as well as perfect training for how to find holes in arguments.
By begining with Socrates, the student is exposed to robust and relatively accessible arguments on most of the major topics in philosophy.
This helps students approach the questions earnestly.
Trying to begin with an examination of the current thinking on most philosophical topics would be almost impossibly divorced from that which a new entrant to philosophical thinking could grasp in a deep and rewarding way.
Instead, a good philosophy teacher can walk a student through a rewarding exploration of the major topics in philosophy across history, showing how the implausibilities of the past are far more robust than most think and how much of our present intuition is on far shakier ground than most think.
I'm not disputing that modern physics is our best understanding of how the physical world works, but you do lose an important aspect of education by this style of pedagogy. When do you learn what made the best scientific minds what they were? Why should you have to reinvent their learning yourself if you want to be as great as them?
The way 'they' teach physics is just one way to learn it, not necessarily the best. Especially if your goals are not simply to get a degree.
In philosophy, you need to go through all the motions to understand exactly where and why previous approaches fall short. You need to be able to reproduce the exact lines of reasoning, because you need them over and over again. Old paradigms are revisited over and over again. After thoroughly understanding why duality falls short, you discover that there are actually ways to save it. But you have to be very careful not to fall into one of the traps of reasoning that made you reject it previously. A thing like Platonism isn't dead, but any current Platonist has to be very refined in order to keep his philosophy credible.
Its not always about the outcome, but rather the process of reasoning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs
(A google tech talk from someone at the FHI called "Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?" Yeah. They're pretty serious guys.)
EDIT: They also run lesswrong.com. I imagine that's enough to get most here reaching for the UCAS forms...
The FHI has also "sponsored" www.overcomingbias.com, where Robin Hanson still posts and a lot of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences originally appeared.
FYI, the Future of Humanity Institute does have an opening for a postdoc in computer science who wants to branch out into more philosophical/futuristic areas, i.e., they want an academic who already knows algorithms and wants to learn philosophy of mind and rigorous futurism.
Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences and other "hard" disciplines are frustrated by how useless their facts are in solving these debates.
As someone with degrees in both a hard science and philosophy I'd say that philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than other disciplines are to philosophy.
Edit: To be fair, I'll provide an example of what I mean. David Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" is about why we have qualitative experiences. You can explain all of our brain states in functional ways, like pain's function is to prevent damage, but that would still not answer the question of why pain hurts. I don't think science can answer that question, at least not in a way that is observable and testable.
That is the point many in this thread are trying to make. The essence of the question is usually more persistent than it first seems.
That the physical can influence or even determine the mental has been known for at least as long as 3000 years. Those particular experiments you reference don't add much to the philosophical discussion of libertarianism at all.
However, I think the true philosophical problem of free will is deciding what exactly a "will" is and what it means to be "free". You've got to answer that question before you can decide whether free will is compatible or incompatible with determinism.
That may not be as true as you think. Notice the high percentages of internalism, libertarianism, and other positions associated with dualism. (Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask flat out about dualism):
I was confused, because (not having taken any philosophy classes since 1990) I didn't recognize the term as anything but political. I thought other people might similarly be confused if they weren't familiar with the philosophical use of "libertarian".
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 526 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 252 / 931 (27%)
Other 153 / 931 (16.4%)
Since they didn't ask about dualism directly, nor, as far as I can tell, any position that logically entails dualism, obviously there is no deductive implication here.
I'm making a probabilistic point - non-physicalism is heavily represented (more than a quarter) among the group Samd specified, and thus there are pretty good odds that at least one academic philosopher espouses the specific non-physicalist theory of dualism.
That doesn't mean there were serious papers about how much the soul weighs, etc., but rather that some were still puzzling over whether strict materialism is fully satisfying or not.
edit: I now see your comment about Chalmers below. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
There is plenty of philosophical work that attempts to make sense of recent advances in brain science. A lot of it is centered around the 'hard problem of consciousness', or the question of why we have phenomenal experiences at all (and how these correlate to neural events). Although most serious proponents discard dualism, not all of them agree that phenomenal experiences can be reduced to physical phenomena (Dave Chalmers, Thomas Nagel).
To the scientifically biased the idea that physicalism isn't true is abhorrent, but contemporary philosophy, although not univocal, has serious arguments against it. If you find yourself dismissing this idea right off the bat out of scientific intuition I would urge you to read up a little bit on modern philosophy of mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://consc.net/papers/ncc2.html
(I also took a mind-body problem class as an undergrad, at Georgetown. It actually wasn't as bad as the one you describe, though nor was it perfect.)
Isn't this why the Socratic method was invented? Rather than simply argue, Socrates asked questions and let his interlocutors draw their own conclusions.
Philosophy of the Mind is much different from Artificial Intelligence. And it is also much different from Neuroscience.
Neuroscience asks 'How does the Brain work?' (Based in biology and chemistry).
Artificial intelligence asks 'How do I simulate human intelligence?' (Based in math, and computer science, complexity theory).
Philosophy of the mind asks a lot of messy questions that don't really fall into either of those buckets. The mind isn't the brain, and the mind isn't strictly human intelligence, so what is it?. What is consciousness? How is it that I have an idea of self? What are my perceptions? How do I model the world around me? What's up with free will?
It is as much about asking these questions and refining them into new questions, as it is about anything else, and most of these questions really can't be answered with scientific facts or mathematical algorithms.
From the aspect of learning philosophy in a historical context, you kind of have to, otherwise you are sort of doomed to repeat the mistakes of others who came before. In stark contrast to science, in philosophy, you are questioning the nature of reality. Hence you cannot really design experiments (unless you are G.E. Moore), to prove this or that philosophical property. Instead, you have to build on all of the other work that has come before you, and understand why the things that people thought were true, are untenable or not true.
(rather long unrelated tangent: A number of people, like pg, think this is kind of stupid. The other options, unfortunately, are chasing our tails, or simply saying that these questions are unanswerable. Sometimes, Wittgenstein is interpreted as saying that all philosophical questions are simply reduced to 'language games'.My interpretation is more that he is making a statement about the relationship between reality and language, we are using language do describe reality, but there are certain things which contain the reality which cannot be described with language, because language is a part of that reality. There is a very strong parallel between his work and Godels'.)
So no, philosophers do not ignore science. But a lot of the time, when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much. (Why use philosophy where you can use objective fact?)
Another example is that philosophy is very firmly ingrained in things like string theory or quantum mechanics. But the truth is, string theory and quantum mechanics boil down to equations which describe things that we have already observed. You still need a discipline in which you can speculate and say, 'Ok, but what does this mean about the nature of my reality? How does this effect me beyond being interesting math? What is the implication here?'
And that is what philosophy does.
It's not that you are bad at articulating this stuff, it's just that it is very hard to articulate. You quoted Wittgenstein - he also said that philosophy is an activity, one where we strive to make our ideas clear - by at least trying to articulate your thoughts you are walking down this road so don't apologize!
I think this sums up quite well why philosophy is perceived the way it is. Once something becomes useful it turns into a new field, which explains why it may seem as if philosophy accomplished nothing.
Historically speaking, all (sans math? ~) western science stems from philosophy in its broadest sense.
"when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much"
The "so much" part was what troubled me -- most of the philosophy of mind class was historical developments, etc., but occasionally it did step into the realm of science, while ignoring everything science had to offer. Perhaps I had an ill-informed professor, but when the parent says that philosophy of mind deals with "messy questions", that suggests that sometimes it can tread on the toes of fact, even if unintentionally. The inability to recognize when that was happening was what disappointed me.
It is like a financial model for a startup. In the beginning you guess at what your revenue and expenses are. Then you learn some facts (my rent is $xxxx/mo and I currently have xxx paying customers). You adjust the model based on the new facts, but the rest is still your best guesswork.
You have to take science to date into account. If you do not, you will be proven wrong immediately. You will say 'I think the universe is composed entirely of jelly beans', and I will say 'y experiment disproves that'. If there is an empirical way to answer a question, you should use it. Empiricism works well because it is very convincing.
A lot of the time, you do not have an empirical way to answer your question, because the technology doesn't exist, or the terminology for the question that you want to ask doesn't exist, or you haven't yet adequately specified what the question is.
At its best, it should be the building of a rational, informed, theory about a conceivable hypothetical situation, and rational explorations of the implications of that hypothetical.
One of the things which philosophy does (and has done) is to clarify which questions to ask, how to ask them, and so forth. Once the problem domain is clarified enough, science can step in and start being useful. Of course, there is no clear-cut border between the two (which can be seen historically in the development of physics, biology, etc.)
That's definitely not the only thing which philosophy does, but I think that's the idea being discussed here.
Even more recently, the entire field of psychology grew directly out of philosophical speculation about mental states. Starting with Kant in the late 18th century and ending with James early in the 20th, the study of the mind became an accepted part of natural philosophy or science (having James on the faculty of Harvard certainly didn't hinder the acceptance of psychology as a science).
For instance the natural sciences were studied under the heading of natural philosophy for a reason at one point!
Do you mean the difference of hardware and actual content or something else?
and the mind isn't strictly human intelligence, so what is it?. What is consciousness? How is it that I have an idea of self? What are my perceptions? How do I model the world around me? What's up with free will?
Isn't that what neuroscience probably will answer at some time? For example, we might get an answer to these questions from the Blue Brain project.
And maybe AI also in a somewhat different way. For example, we might get the result that all kind of intelligence has some form of consciousness and we could even define it somehow because of the knowledge we get out of AI. I even think it is very likely that we will get an advanced knowledge of what intelligence is by advances in AI.
It is very conceivable that things without brains could have minds. 'Strong' Artificial Intelligence is an example of this. Intelligent quasars would be another example. (Meat that thinks? Preposterous!)
It is also very conceivable that things without minds, could have brains. Does a dog have a mind? aardvark? chipmunk? toad? ant? They all have brains that function in basically the same way as ours do. Saying that the mind doesn't really exist is also an acceptable answer, but kind of an odd one from the perspective of someone experiencing it.
Point being: Neuroscience is primarily mechanical.
It explains human brains and monkey brains and dog brains equally well. It explains hwo they work. We primarily study human brains because we have a vested interest in understanding them. (Also we consider our own brains to be the best). We end up studying the mind in neuroscience, because it is one of the interesting (and complicated) phenomena of the human brain (as compared to an ant brain).
I think by trying to create True AI we will learn more about these questions than philosophy will ever be able to teach us.
I only passed the exam because I aced the other question about artificial minds in which I knew all about Turing machines and other stuff backwards from my knowledge about computers that my fellow philosophy students didn't.
While I grant everything you've said, the lack of rigor cuts both ways. In my experience, many if not most who come from the non-philosophy discipline arrive with little to no respect for the philosophy half of the course. They enter with the popular conception of philosophy as something vague and contemplative.
What this leads to is that the non-philosophy participants get frustrated that the discussion seems to center on silly or archaic questions of metaphysics, as you have described regarding dualism. In truth, though, most of the archaic questions persist with more sophisticated questions and pushed farther down the rabbit hole.
Take dualism, for example. While dualism in the sense of the ancient and medieval philosophers has no supporters remaining, the ontological status of consciousness and intelligence is still a much-contested topic.
I want to emphasize, here, that I'm not talking about the causal status of various states of consciousness or that consciousness seems wholly dependent on physical processes and structures. These are trivial points and givens in a modern discussion of the topic.
The interesting question is not the basis or the mechanism of sentience but rather the phenomenon of the sentience itself. Even if a thought is entirely constituted by physical phenomena, it corresponds with a separate set of subjective phenomena which are not obviously physical -- our internal life and our awareness.
With no disrespect intended and with no pretense that my understanding of these problems is anything approaching complete, I've found that many who share your experience to not fully have grasped the essence of the given problem in question, often satisfied with an intuitive answer that, were they to more seriously delve into the matter, they might understand to have been powerfully undermined 2500 years earlier.
There's a reason that when most of the sciences spun out from under the label of philosophy, some matters of consequence and importance defied progressing toward that more solid ground.
I expect many would say that this is because the remaining questions are nonsensical. Despite my personal experience to the contrary, I understand this viewpoint. It is at least worth consideration, though, that the philosophical questions that remain won't submit to the scientific method; that's why they are philosophy. Many of the greatest minds in history struggled with these questions, for centuries, not because they were lacking in relevant facts but because they realized this special class of problem that seemed impossibly beyond any collection of future facts.
In studying philosophy, it's difficult but essential to guard against letting the absurdities of a given era's ignorance occlude the essential aspects of their arguments on questions that are still open. Usually those arguments prove to be quite relevant to the modern understanding with only minor tweaks to particulars.
*As an aside, please excuse me for placing all of this under your comment as I'm not trying to lecture you as much as present ideas in response to similar themes your anecdote evokes. I don't doubt that your experience is exactly as you said and that you understand the open problems even better than I do. Your writing, though, opened a more general line of thought that I wanted to express in reply to be seen by on-lookers rather than something aimed at you in particular.
How about oop which is modeled after plato's ontology of forms? Processes/Objects, this line of inquiry nor the language originated from cs.
Philosophy is relevant to CS. The challenge is contextualizing the domain in a relevant way.
Just because we answer one of (what,when,why,how,where) does not mean the whole problem is solved.
Feynman on a related problem : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
Unfortunately, this tradition of honest and deep questions and answers has mostly sort of tapered off...
I think everything you are saying is actually more reason this is necessary, esp. right now as our understanding of machine learning and AI are beginning to yield some progress. And for some reason this reminds me of Krishnamurti and David Bohm conversing about the nature of consciousness - bringing together two worlds that typically are apart is really fascinating and ripe for new discovers of thought and understanding. All good things.
Some classic videos of their fascinating conversation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knu4ujA1rfU
Some philosophers like Bertrand Russell initiated some of the deepest scientific questions. And it's still philosophy (in the figure of Karl Popper) that defined what makes science. Philosophy is the meta-science par excellence.
Apparently you had some bad luck, by discovering philosophy from a poor professor. I had the luck to discover philosophy through some deeply interesting professors, even though I could deeply disagree with them (my first professor of philosophy even was a priest, eeek). I never stopped studying philosophy ever since I was 16, and I probably never will.
You're on the slippery slope to philosophy, here :)
I'd like to see extended to a post-grad program. You could choose either business coding or academic coding. Both are rich areas for combining these two disciplines. Philosophy gives CS a broader, more conceptual view of how things fit together, and CS gives philosophy something useful to do -- it provides a hard edge from which to judge whether one philosophical stance is more or less useful in a given situation.
I did a double major in CS and Business during my undergrad at CMU ('09) and focused very much on practical learning (read: programming/web apps) and corporate/startup endeavors. However, I was always drawn towards studying the relationship between minds and machines on my own time. Mostly triggered from Godel's theorem, reading GEB/AI books, and some obsessive impulse to learn about my own mind.
Now that I'm working my first job, this impulse is stronger than ever. I find myself reading papers/books on philosophy, anthropic mechanism, AI, etc. during what free time I have. I suspect that I should study a PhD in this subject, given this impulse doesn't seem to be going away.
However, I have absolutely no research experience and had little contact with professors during my undergrad. Would you advise I seriously pursue this intellectual interest as a PhD (versus during my free time)? If so, do you have any thoughts on how I should go about applying? Given that most applications require research recommendations, I was thinking of contacting professors of papers I admired, but am not sure how well that approach would work.
Thank you for reading! My email is in my profile if that works better.
The only additional reason to get a PhD besides the license is an increased probability of being in contact with peers who you can collaborate with. People often undervalue this but empirically it's pretty clear what the benefits of having at least one research collaborator are.
If you actually do decide to go for a PhD, you're going to need at least one strong recommendation that speaks to your research ability if you want to get into a top program. Your undergrad institution and GPA put you in the running to be sure, but admissions committees are looking for evidence that you can perform research. Recommendations that say "this kid got an A in my class and is a good student" don't really have an impact on your application either way.
"Big AI" isn't very much in favor currently, partly for good reasons and partly for bad reasons. There's a strong worry about being too unrigorous or philosophical or vague or even sci-fi. Academic AI probably overcorrects for a fear of being seen like crazy singularity-mongers, and there's also a legacy of having over-promised some big-AI stuff in the '50s and '60s. Most funding is also for more concrete technical projects, though there is a subset of people doing some funded research in the area of artificial creativity and creativity support (Margaret Boden and Gerhard Fischer are two entry points into that literature).
So, most research tends to be much narrower and investigate specific empirical or mathematical questions, like whether a particular reinforcement-learning algorithm converges, or how to improve an object-tracking algorithm, or something of that sort. Even in Cog Sci departments, the theses tend to be more specific, like doing an eye-tracking study that investigates some question about perception. To the extent the "bigger picture" stuff gets done at all, there's a feeling that it's a late-career thing people like Hofstadter can get away with, but it's harder to do as a PhD thesis.
Not sure that actually answered your question, but the short version is: it's hard to get in a position where you can study the kind of stuff discussed in GEB, but if you can think of more specific technical questions on the peripheries of your big-picture interests, it may be more doable.
You could say this about almost every discipline, except maybe for religious studies and a couple other niche fields. Ignoring the epistemology is easily one of the biggest problems with academia today, to the point where 'higher education' generally isn't even much worth doing.
There is a pervasive attitude on HN and elsewhere that we don't need epistemology anymore because we have iPods and penicillin, which is anti-intellectual (and flat-out wrong) to the point of being sickening.
There is a lot of two-way synergies between philosophy and mathematics, more so in days gone by, less so now. Many modern philosophers had a leg in both camps. Think Descartes, Leibniz ... Very recent philosophers have tended to stick to mathematical logic. Think Russell, Frege, the early Wittgenstein, Kripke. Now where is mathematical logic used an awful lot? Um, computer science! Little bit of a coincidence, no?
Computer science is part engineering, part craftsmanship, part mathematics. Many interesting conceptual problems are generated by comp sci that have been tackled in philosophy of mind and epistemology (by the way, I think you're using that word wrong) and the synergies are great.
You could absolutely not say this about any two disciples taken at random. There is of course the debate in academia that you allude to that the disciplines are becoming over specialised and that there is not enough cross-talk (inter-disciplinarity / trans-disciplinarity) going on and these debates have been held in cultural studies and at the governing board level of universities ... don't think these people don't see what's going on in front of there noses. It's a tricky problem to solve, there are only so many hours in the day and industry demands employable minds.
I was talking about philosophy and other disciplines, not two disciplines taken at random.
With my statement about epistemology, I just meant that most people (incorrectly) believe things like "penicillin works, therefore the monoamine hypothesis must be correct." Of course they don't actually say this, but that's how their thinking works. Or similarly, "iPods get better every year, therefore god does not exist."
And I'm not trying to make any claims about the validity of depression or religion (at least here), rather I'm just trying to point out how broken most people's thinking is.
For example, all of science rests on the assumptions that the world is as it appears (empiricism), there are no supernatural forces, etc. Why do most people buy into these beliefs so strongly even though there is zero evidence for them? The basic reasoning is that empiricism must be correct because we have iPods, therefore 'science' (scientism) is correct, therefore there is no god, etc. (See also: http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#Science)
It's a devastating belief system, because the more books these people read the dumber they get. If you don't believe me just read through some of the Reddit comments on r/atheism. Regardless of whether there is or is not a god, it's clear that the modern atheist movement is basically just a fad for dumb people. (Though from a social and political perspective I think it's a good thing.)
The thing is this doesn't just happen in religious debates, it happens virtually everywhere, but most people just don't realize it. It's funny because modernism as an intellectual movement crashed and burned spectacularly over fifty years ago, but most people (including many highly acclaimed scientists) don't even know it yet.
Interesting observation. You can see why it comes about though. It's not like people are going out of there way to be dumb :) They are fed a bunch of triumphalism too. And people are easily misled. Once science starts providing a lot of answers about the universe and also once it starts giving us comforts and toys it's hard not to extrapolate.
Modern atheism is not just a fad for dumb people. That's unfair. Don't forget how hostile religion was to individual atheists. We are living in a comparatively secular time and atheism is in the air. To be fair, when kids are told about Santa Claus they believe that too. I tell my kid that I believe there is no God and that organized religion is not the best way to spiritually develop yourself. You get dumb people everywhere. Socially it's a _great_ thing in my opinion. One less excuse to blow each other up. Now all we have to do is to dislodge the nation-state concept, that's going to be tricky.
I'm curious. Are you a postmodernist? :) How do you think the modernist project crashed and burned? I think modernism as a coherent ideology was never all that pervasive and also was very lumpy (not evely distributed).
That's one of the reasons why I support the movement, but that doesn't make it correct. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with atheism. That being said, I think Dawkins is kind of dumb, and unfortunately he's the face of the modern movement and the one that everyone cites.
"How do you think the modernist project crashed and burned?"
The eugenics movement and the holocaust.
"Are you a postmodernist?"
I haven't read enough postmodernist lit to feel comfortable putting myself in that camp, though certainly many of my critiques of modernity are along the same lines.
While contemporary academic philosophy is little more than a circular passing of jargon, there is no doubt that the practice of philosophy has inspired great science. Kant, for example, wrote books about anatomy and other empirical topics prior to this metaphysical work, and made prescient suggestions about the existence of other galaxies and the theory of evolution. Perhaps an infusion of CS will help win Philosophy back from the ivory tower.
More than just in grand sweeping ways, the fields align in the little ways, too. My wife understands my work more quickly than other non-hackers because she understands the concept of a rigorous artificial language ( she uses formal logic, I use programming languages ).
Applying isn't the same thing as "getting in"--it's one small part. Where do you apply to? What matters in the application? Do you apply under the course or do you apply generically? Are "A-levels" a thing that matters? What are people looking for in applicants, or how do you find out?
I'm not sure if what we call 'Oxbridge', the big 2 (Oxford & Cambridge) handle their own applications, but I'm pretty sure Ucas is the place you need to start.
I know it works (at least for UK students) on a points system, where you get points per course, and the amount is set by the grades you get.
Things are different if your a 'mature' student, and if you have 'life experience'. Best thing to do is get in touch, and write a very compelling 'personal statement'. The latter being the first step to application.
I'm sure theres a few guys here who can give you more (oxbridge) related advice.
'UCAS Points' are only really counted for the lower-end of universities. Any university anywhere near Oxbridge in terms of reputation or entrance requirements gives offers based on A Level or International Baccalaureate or other qualifications, often followed by an interview.
For example my first and second choice universities offered AAA and AAB respectively.
Only an absurdly low amount of characters (with spaces) are allowed for the personal essay, 1600, 2400, or something, so don't start preparing for a 36-page-long piece of circumspection.
It's really down-putting that there is so little focus on this part, as this is what allows applicants to stand out the most.
The single most important part of the Oxbridge application process is the interview. That's where you get to sit down with two professors that take you through challenging math problems (in case of Computer Science) and you are supposed to take them through your thinking process. Now, _that_ is where you can stand out. That's more like it.
Applying to Oxbridge involves applying to one of the colleges that offers that degree programme. See this list:
http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/admissions/ugrad/Computer_Science...
I suggest you look at
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/how_to_...
If your test scores are sufficient, you'll be invited to an interview. See previous discussion:
Just F*ckin Do It, that's what it takes to be successful
I promise you: get off your ass and good things will come, you may fail sometimes, but if you aren't failing often you're not trying hard enough
TL;DR: Just do it, don't overplan it, you'll plan about it later
Oxford works under the tutorial system. There's a set number of courses and subjects, and every course is specific and roughly fixed. This is basically what the U.S. system calls a major, but you don't generally study anything outside of major. Every class you take is within your course. For the course I applied to, every week there's: 10 lectures, 5 hours of practicals (like labs), and at least two tutorials (which are really small, 1-3 person discussions with your course tutor, sort of like preceptorials in the U.S.)
The narrowness of your course of study is both an advantage and a disadvantage, and you usually graduate with a BA/BS in 3 years and a masters in 4 (compared to 4 years/2 years in the US)
You apply to a specific course at a specific college:
- When you make your application, you make it for the one course you want to study. This means that you need to know before you apply, there is no declaring of majors and it's generally pretty hard to change courses.
- Oxford is made up of about 40 colleges. Most colleges offer most courses; the courses are the same at every college, but the tutors are different, and the main differences between colleges are in the culture, location, facilities, tradition + formality, size, funding, events, and number of tourists, etc. People make a big fuss about which college is better, but really its just be one that fits you the best.
- You can only apply to one course at one college. Each college has a fixed number of spots, which is generally pretty small (ex. CompSci only has 2-3 at Balliol College). If you're a good candidate but the college you've applied to is full, they will pool you for the other colleges. You can also make an open application, which means you are up for any college, but this means you'll generally end up at a less popular or attractive college and there are debates as to whether it negatively impacts your application
As far as the practical aspects, there's around 3 steps:
1. You make an application through UCAS (a.k.a Common App for U.K.) For Oxford and Cambridge, this is due October 15th. This includes an essay, a recommendation, and your testing scores. As an American student, you send SAT, SAT II, and AP scores instead (or equivalent). A-Levels are sort of like AP classes over here, but you are limited to typically 3 or 4. The recommendation is the same, but also talks about your suitability for your selected course. The essay is pretty short, but is more like a resume + cover letter than the Common App essay. You talk about your interests, extracurriculars, and reasons for selecting your course along with your qualifications for that course.
2. Sometime in late November/December, you'll hear back on whether or not you were shortlisted. This means that you've passed the first round of applications, and you'll be subsequently invited to interview at your college. The rate for shortlisting is typically above 60% but depends on course, and is based on your UCAS app.
3. You'll interview at your college with the tutors for your course in December. Everybody who is shortlisted for that particular course goes on the same few days. In my experience, this was like a behavioral job interview, where they ask you conceptual and practical questions and want you to describe your thought process as you solve the problem (e.g., "how would you calculate the efficiency of a fridge?"-type questions but also the "how comfortable is that chair?"-kind.) Earlier HN discussion about CS interview questions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2103161
4. If you do well, you'll receive an offer in late December/January which is either conditional or unconditional. Unconditional = congrats, welcome to Oxford, while conditional = we like you, but we'd like to see you get a 5 on your CompSci AP, etc. Here the rate of acceptance is much lower, but again depends on course and college, and is based heavily on your interview.
Universities only give unconditional offers when you are already overqualified for the course at step 1. Even mid-range unis will rarely give an unconditional offer to someone who is still taking their exams. I imagine oxford or cambridge doing so is pretty much unheard of.
I cant speak of Oxford, but I knew several people at Cambridge who changed subjects (sometimes more than once). It's not trivial, but if you want it enough then there isn't much to stop you. (Once you are there then the college's MO is to support your academic success, whatever path it takes). Take-away: don't be put-off applying by this - if you need to change, you can.
More info: http://www.ousu.org/acaff/undergraduate-specific-information...
A friend switched from computer science to linguistics, it can be done.
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/prospective-students/undergraduate...
(Previously this was part of the interview process)
In the UK system, if you tend to apply having done half your A-Levels, meaning you'll get a conditional offer asking for specific grades when you complete them (AAA etc). If you apply after having finished them (and after having met their requirements, obviously), then you can get an unconditional offer.
That's the best answer I can imagine to, "How do I write a good book?"
The difference between writers and everyone else? Writers write. Want to write a book? Start typing. Want to write a good book? You won't do it on your first try, so start typing.
The time for literary criticism and feedback is after you've written something to work with.
The Oxford University Entrance requirements, http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses... , state the following:
"US qualifications: Successful candidates would typically have SAT Reasoning Test scores of at least 700 in Critical Reading, Mathematics and the Writing Paper, or ACT with a score of at least 32 out of 36. We would also expect Grade 5 in three or more Advanced Placement tests in appropriate subjects or SAT Subject Tests in three appropriate subjects at 700 or better."
- I have no idea what that all means, but for comparison, every single Brit applying will have straight A-grades in their A-levels, and selection is almost entirely based on the interview (and in some cases, extra advanced examinations). So take these entrance requirements with a pinch of salt; they're necessary but not sufficient.
All that said, the colleges have extremely wide lee-way in how they make their offers, so exceptional candidates with a slightly offbeat scholastic record might have a chance. Some cynics also note that foreign students may have an advantage because they bring in far more money. But all in all the academic requirements are quite high. To sum up, it's very hard to get in, but not because of prejudice or snobbery, just intense competition.
For British students, once you turn twenty-one you no longer have the same strict entry requirements, instead it's more a case of proving that you're the kind of person they want than showing what exams you've passed. (Though they're likely to ask you to do some studying before applying, to demonstrate that you're willing/able to learn.)
Most likely the same for international 'mature students' as well.
The application process is phenomenally simple, especially when compared to that for American universities.
1. You fill out an application for Oxford, containing basic biographical information and some information about the course and college you want to apply for.
2. You fill out a more detailed UCAS application, with your academic history, etc. and write a personal statement
3. You get called for interview either by phone, in person in New York/Vancouver, or in person in Oxford depending on what you can do.
4. You take an exam in your subject of choice.
All of this happens between October and November, and you get a response in late December.
Your choice of College is somewhat important, as it determines the life you'll have at Oxford, so research that in some depth. I went to New, and loved it, and my thesis supervisor was at Magdalen which is just lovely in every conceivable way (he's also a pretty kickass Computer Scientist).
Academically, you'll want a decent SAT score, a good mix of SAT II's and AP's, and a good recommendation from a teacher in a relevant subject area.
(Generalizing from myself with a sample size of one)
"If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life." --Steve Martin
From my (limited) knowledge of how comlab/Oxford works, it looks like students will be splitting their time between the philosophy department and comlab.
I can't quite see how they're marrying the two together. I know from my first degree that it's a great combination - there's more crossover than you'd initially think. But it does rather seem as though you'd just be splitting your time between two very different departments, rather than literally studying the two subjects in harmony.
Interesting development though.
(PS: happy to answer your questions about Oxford/CS/applying/etc)
I'm pretty sure there's at least a few dozen moderately active HN users from Oxford (I'm one).
Edit: realised you're probably not here anymore.
They strongly encouraged CS majors to dual-major in CS/Philosophy or CS/Psychology. It was called the "Minds and Machines" program and was a precursor to their full-on undergraduate Cognitive Science program, Which didn't exist when I started in 2006 but does today.
I went in as Computer Science and picked up the CS/Philosophy dual-major in my first semester after talking at length to my advisor (who was head of Minds and Machines and is now head of Cognitive Science).
People ask me about it a lot when they find out, but to me it always seemed like an impeccably good match.
That almost happened to me. I started with CS at RIT, but since they didn't have a philosophy major, I left as a sophomore.
Apparently, the year after I left, they got a major. I was told by a professor that I was one of the examples used in the lobbying for the major. This didn't make me feel much better.
"There was a problem with respect to how my diploma course would be financed. In those days there were two main grant-giving bodies funding postgraduate study: the Department of Education and the Science Research Council. The former limited its grants to graduates in non-scientific subjects while the latter would only fund students undertaking research degrees in the pure sciences. These regulations precluded my Philosophy of Science studies being funded by either body."
That said, philosophy is incredibly important. But, as PG has noted, we tend to do a poor job of it (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html). We need to spend more time focused on saying useful, testable things. In short, the best scientific results merge with philosophy. So, everyone should be a philosopher, but should do the majority of their philosophy as science.
Again, both philosophy and computer science are important, but after studying both pretty intensely for 3.5 years (I graduated with over 180 credit hours), you have to pick and choose the philosophy. It's mostly useful for setting the initial biases on which the rest of your science will depend and for continuing to think about things science can't speak to, yet.
Maybe Comp. Sci. is too important to be in the "Sciences". What about all those in the humanities that would benefit from knowing how to code and having the basics of knowledge about data structures and algorithms?
I know many numbers of people with history degrees, philosophy degrees (myself included), you name it - who taught themselves how to code because it was impossible for them to take comp sci course as part of humanities.
There is this new field of electronic poetry where poets use the power of computers and the internet to create a new kind of poetry. These people generally come from a background in literature and they are very creative types but they have to enlist the help of graphics designers and programmers to do computer side of things as opposed to the poetic side of things.
It is like literacy. Before the twentieth century pervasive literacy was not the norm. I would argue that computers are nearly too ubiquitous and will only become more and more so that computer literacy is a real hindrance. The option should be there to those that want it.
Computer science, mathematics and logic should inhabit a third academic space in academia I would argue. Science/Engineering, Comp Sci/Math/Logic, Humanities ...
Any takers? :)
(And by "seriously", I mean beyond a passing understanding of philosophy of mind. If you haven't read the better part of the canon, including boring folk such as Kant or Descartes, that isn't being serious)
Hopefully they won't rely too much on SAT marks for the admission process, and will look at our portfolios. It would be a shame to miss out on a potential star for this program because of low standard test grades. This is a super opportunity!
I think the idea of combining the fields is really brilliant. Nowadays I do a lot of programming (I founded a couple of businesses that are software-focussed), and would love to have had just this kind of educational background.
Loved CS. Loved Philosophy. Hated their intersection, which I thought I was going to base my career around, when I was 17. Oops.
Still a fun degree though.
The biggest problem with them, that they dare to reason about things, which they never learnt or have no hands-on experience.
They will substitute benchmarks and experiments by their theoretical logical conclusions.
Same thing happens with people, who have PhD in one field and try to reason about things in different distant domain.
You might think that philosophy moves very slowly but a few disciplines that have emerged are bio-ethics, deep-ecology, connections between aesthetics and justice and all ground is gone over all the time.
I got a degree in phil. and math. I taught myself how to program and read theoretical comp sci books on data structures and algorithms, operating systems and compiler theory, type theory and symbolic calculus and the church / turing thesis and so on to flesh out the other side but I would dearly love to have been formally taught the comp sci stuff because in truth I went through it all for the love of it and have rarely applied that knowledge :)
I feel like I'm split down the middle, I am delighted that there now exists a course like this. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
So then should be an arts degree at all? I would say yes, and thats only for people who just feel overwhelmed by science or engineering (who I come across aplenty) and prefer to study only the arts. If there should be an arts-only degree, why would I propose that engineering be always accompanied by study of lit-phil? Simply because I believe that a mind that needs to grasp engineering has to be somewhat prepared by philosophy and literature and whetted constantly by it during the study.
Now, the only kicker is that at the age of doing a bachelors (which is between 17-19 and 21-23 for the majority), the average engineering bachelor student would not be mature enough to appreciate a healthy dosage of lit-phil. They would inevitably ask why they are being subjected to something totally unrelated - whereas they do not understand that the subject matter is slowly working on their brain in the background (if they care to put an effort into it).
Hope this does not come across as a rant against engineering. I studied electrical engineering and have utmost regard for the field (much more so than "software engineering" - and I am not talking about computer science and engineering here). But I believe its crucial to pay attention to how we inculcate that engineering knowledge into minds in general. And develop engineers that are not afraid to think and contemplate.
At my alma mater we didn't have minors at all, only "concentrations" and concentrations were required to be interdisciplinary. Of course St. Olaf is a specific American school, I may be overgeneralizing to Oxford.
For those in the UK unaware, "X and Y" suggests an approximate 50:50 split. "X with Y" suggests a heavy emphasis on X, more of a 75:25 split.
And as others have pointed out, in the UK, apart from in some specific degrees (Cambridge Science Tripos springs to mind), the idea of completing a degree out of mainly self-selected units is a bit crazy.
The point of a philosophy education is not to teach you anything in particular; there's no body of knowledge to absorb in the same way that there is for math or any scientific or engineering discipline. At most, you can treat a philosophy education as a history course focusing on the history of human thought (which is why, in response to some other posters, it's important in philosophy to study the past, even if no one believes such things anymore: it's more like history than physics).
The really valuable thing for me, however, was learning the process itself: how to make assumptions and pre-conditions clear and separate them from the rest of your thinking, how to make arguments clearly and fairly, how to break complex questions or topics down into smaller pieces and the put them back together, how to not take it personally when someone disagrees with you. A philosophy course of study will also make you a better, clearer writer and communicator. (And yes, sure, there's plenty of room for BSing and incomprehensibility in there, but if you take that away from a philosophy course you're missing out.)
All those skills translate and complement computer science very well. At its core, the process of software engineering (as opposed to just programming) is the art of taking something really complex and breaking it down into the right set of components: ones that are large enough to be useful, but small enough to be correct, and with the right relationships between them. Taking a large program or problem and breaking it down like that is basically exactly the same set of skills that you develop when you study (and do) analytic philosophy. Being able to clearly separate assumptions, facts, conjecture, predictions, and arguments is also a key skill in a domain like CS where thinking outside the box, as it were, is always important, and where the rules and possibilities change so rapidly. And of course, it never hurts to become a better writer: I've worked with and known some brilliant engineers who were far less productive than they should have been simply because they couldn't present their ideas clearly enough to other people, and there's simply no way to get a team to all work in the same direction if they don't all share the same vision. A brilliant idea that no one else understands because it's been poorly communicated is usually fairly worthless.
As an aside: I know PG doesn't seem to think he got much value out of his philosophy classes, but I wonder if his essays would be as clearly thought out and put together as they are without it. I certainly know my own writing would be far less clear (and far less rigorous) if I hadn't done my BA in philosophy and if I'd just focused on CS.
I think the greatest benefit of my undergrad years haunting the philosophy department is that if I'm going to argue a point, I'm damn sure I'll have satisfied myself with my position, and have ready refutations for all counter-arguments I can think of. I don't comment much on web sites because the rigour of this far exceeds the two cents my opinion is worth.
My advice for anyone contemplating philosophy is this: learn to be good with analogies. Explaining abstract concepts is difficult and a good analogy (and here I mean a genuinely fitting one) goes a long, long way. If you spend a lot of time just thinking about stuff anyway, studying philosophy really gives you a lot of quite interesting stuff to think about: what is truth? Can we know something without expressing knowledge of it? If so, how can I know that you know something without your expressing it? A heady trapdoor indeed.
I'm already seeing job adds for sysadmins, php programmers and front end developers requiring a CS degree. In the future they'll be philosophers too?
That sounds like a lot of research in maths and CS.