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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you consider thinking "What would I anticipate differently depending on the answer?" when faced with such a question to be a philosophical consideration, but at that point everything becomes philosophy of some form and you lose the meaning of the term. ("Everyone philosophizes" is another such generalization that doesn't help communication.)

The problem with people trying to directly answer such questions (and questions like the classic tree-falls-in-a-forest one) does come from people, where else would it come from? But Philosophy as an art (not the general everything-is-philosophy) encourages these errors by positing the questions and then leaving them there as "cool mysteries". To carry on a metaphor of your post's sister, the mind is full of traps that lead to religious thinking, but Religion does nothing to help avoid those traps and actively encourages the sloppy thinking that results.

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I think it's laymen rather than philosophers that are responsible for things being left as "cool mysteries." To philosophers, I gather, they're "open questions," things that either haven't been resolved yet because discourse is ongoing, or because philosophers have failed to find an answer. Or if they have been resolved, then they're questions presented by philosophy teachers to sharpen their students' analytical skills. But the questions rather than the skills trickle down to non-philosophers.

As a non-philosopher, I do personally like a cool mystery for its own sake, but my point, I suppose, is that since the question of "which one is the fork" reduces almost exactly to the Philosophy 101 presentation of the problem of identity over time, the same framework can be used for analyzing it. If I were to write a paper on it, my thesis would be that the question of "which one is the fork" is the result of a bug in the layer of semantics, and so what actually happens is determined by the lower layers of abstraction: code, law, and psychology.

Philosophy is useful in that it makes it easy to identify when someone is in over their head and just stringing together words.

"The problem with people trying to directly answer such questions... does come from people, where else would it come from?"

My point is that it specifically comes from the people making that error, not humanity in general, which would be meaningless. You tried to make it sound like I'm making a null point, but there is a point there. I was reacting to your own categorization as Philosophy as a distinct entity that can be disliked. Perhaps what you really meant is "Non-questions like these are also why a great many people dislike philosophers." I wouldn't have responded to that.

Now I suppose I'm qualifying for the category of people who are disliked. Well, that's neither news, nor particularly fair; I'm very not post-modern and while I fully understand the idea of the journey being the good part, the destination is very important too.

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