What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
philpapers.org
philpapers.org
Explanations of many of the questions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_p...
What do professional philosophers believe, and why? http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professiona...
Here's a list of links to more discussions: http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420 I haven't actually gone through these, though.
You might also want to check out:
Survey of eating habits among philosophers: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...
Survey of beliefs among economists: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists...
I assumed they all starved because one guy never passed the fork.
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)
Does it make a difference if it's a teleporter that destroys the original as an necessary part of its function, vs one that destroyed the original but didn't need to do so, vs one that did not destroy the original?
I would hope that any working 'teletransporter' would provide a near-enough-perfect replica?
By any external measure the replica could be functionally and physically identical to the original, but so long as new matter is used it would still be a replica.
But in terms of selves, of consciousness, they're all isolated phenonema. I think consciousness is merely an illusion, we think we have continuity because we inherit the memories and thought processes from the self from the moment before, but all that exists is a moment of awareness (the "now"), which is analogous to a clock of a computer processor.
The upside, of course, is that my philosophy frees me up for gultfree teletransportation. Bring it on!
Physically¹ events happen instantaneously we just can't tell at which precise instant they happen. This is true even with quantised time.
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¹ Perhaps that should say "in the mathematical model of the physical universe we base our science on".
For me, no way in hell.
Even with a minor in philosophy & a degree in linguistics which involved a good deal of philosophies of language and mind, i'm not sure what to make of the results of this survey. Anyone have a better perspective on what the deal is here?
> I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people.
Take a living person and excise part of their brain, and they will continue to live. There have been accidents, injuries, and surgeries that have proven that. I don't know about fully half, but I would not be surprised if it worked.
BUT - take half a brain and transplant it into a different body? There is zero evidence today that that is even possible.
One might say that such technology just hasn't been invented yet. True. But maybe it will never be invented; and thus it's really science fiction disguised as philosophy. I think quite a lot of philosophy ends up being disguised fiction--science or otherwise.
(Note, I'm not advocating for either of these hypotheses, but correlation is not causation.)
I suppose Georg Cantor might be an exception to this.
But I guess you said non-crazy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6dels_ontological_proof
There is certainly a cultural side to philosophy in Modern Western society that is largely anti-religious from the very beginning. I started out as your average fervent evangelical Christian, which I am no longer, but it was initially incredibly uncomfortable in a philosophy department to try to hold on to certain belief systems. However, it is not necessarily for the reasons that one would believe. It is a culturally phenomenon. In older generations, it was entirely unacceptable to be religious and be in philosophy. You were naturally routed towards theology by the university staff because the topics of conversation are entirely different; modern philosophy does not concern itself with the question of religion. Yet, the vast majority of older philosophy professors, when being honest, will acknowledge that despite their atheism there are still countless religious systems that have fascinating thinkers and concepts that are both rational and consistent.
It just so happens that in America, Christianity is the de facto symbol for religion and it is both irrational and inconsistent.
However, if you change the Population selection to the "No Affiliation" option the numbers are still pretty skewed in the atheist direction.
[1] http://www.uwo.ca/philosophy/undergraduate/Courses/2000.html...
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
Accept or lean toward: [..]
Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible 217 / 931 (23.3%)
What does "metaphysically" mean in this context?
Sadly, this question is not related to the possibility that chemical spills can cause the dead to rise and eat brains.
Imagine a being that acted exactly like a human, it spoke, laughed, etc. - everything that you'd imagine a human being to do. However, it does not actually feel or think.
For example, if you were to prick one of these "zombies," they would say "ouch," recoil, perhaps berate you, but the zombie does not actually feel pain - it's a purely mechanical process.
Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of being, properties, identity, etc. What one means by whether such zombies are metaphysically possible is really an answer to the question: are such zombies really any different than how we are?
You can think of zombies as the analog to robots (as is canonical with most AI questions). Robots are essentially philosophical zombies, should we get them to a level of sophistication such that they would be indistinguishable from a human being. Whether such robots could be considered "living," "thinking," or "feeling," is a question to be answered by philosophy.
If you're more interested read about John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. It gives a great example of what you're thinking of.
John Searle's Chinese Room, Turing Test, physicalism, Conway's Game of Life
For all interested in the zombies, check out David Chalmers website: http://consc.net/zombies.html
The guy has stated one of the most famous arguments about the consciousness in his book The Conscious Mind.
There is a stronger version of possibility: nomological possibility, which means something like "possible under the laws of nature". It is nomologically impossible for information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light.
In the context of the philosophy of mind, this question is about whether or not it's possible (in some metaphysically possible world) for there to be fully functioning humans, but minus experience. If so, then experience is a true explanandum.
See [1] for an account of these modal truth states, [2] for an account of philosophical zombies.
[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modality-epistemology/
I'd really like to know if any one idea dominates here - for example, if 38% of philosophers espouse totalitarianism, that's worth getting into.
I'm most surprised to see deontology so high (nearly as high as consequentialism) under normative ethics.
Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else.
People that pull the switch are thought to have more sociopathic tendencies even though doing the action would result in a lower overall number of deaths.
That's interesting. Do you know what is the rationale behind this?
The series is both fascinating and frightening in way. I reccomend watching it to see the current ideas in brain science presented by the people creataing them.
Whether or not the action is rational depends on the underlying principles. If the most important thing is to minimize lives lost, then the moral math of causing harm to one for the benefit of many is simple. However, not everyone would agree with this principle. It's not necessarily more emotional.
Inaction vs. action is an important distinction to some.
Discussing this problem with my G/F showed me a side which is from what I would call a "non-rational" or emotional person. Their choice not to pull the lever is just as rational to them, but not in the cold, hard, numeric way of the rational person. To them it is rational to not cause harm to others if they would never have been harmed, even if more people will be harmed in the end.
It was a bit of a heated discussion that really made me stop and think about why this is such an important question. There is no right answer and each side is quick to justify exactly why their choice is the "right" choice. And the more you think about it the more you realize why both sides can think the way they do; a perfect philosophical question :)
The comment about sociopaths pulling the lever was due to the test being given in prisons to people that were diagnosed as sociopaths. That was the choice that the majority of them took when given the test.
I am not sure what a self-driving car is going to do.
1) "fail" as in get the car load of people killed.
Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
If I had a million dollars, I could buy your love.
* Content of consciousness is the only thing that we can be sure of. Let's say I'm scared. This fact is true no matter if I'm in a dream or hallucinating. (We could argue if "scared" is the correct label for the feeling but that's not the point.)
* It's impossible to define consciousness objectively. Subjective definition is simple: Consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc. There's no way to create a definition, that 1) is logically consistent 2) matches our intuitive understanding of consciousness 3) is objective: you can say whether some group of atoms (like brain) is conscious or not.
I admire your confidence.
If there was a rational counterargument hidden in that, I didn't find it unfortunately.
Many problems on that page are IMHO psychological or sociological problems, e.g. the ethical problems.
True, descriptive ethics is almost entirely composed of various facts about human psychology and sociology, but no normative claim can be deduced from these facts alone.
I'll just note that the philosophers who answered this survey do not appear to agree with you.
Scientists make ontological and metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe, and unless they avail themselves of the philosophy of science there are a lot of arguments that one can't defend against.. There are a lot of fundamentalists who avail themselves of Thomas Kuhn's argument that scientific progress is entirely just cultural consensus amongst scientists, and has no additional metaphysical reality.
Fighting off that argument is squarely in the philosophy of science, as is being able to articulate what it means to observe, theorize about, and know reality.
You're also right that there's only so much time in the day, but it depends on who you have to go through to get stuff done. Who do you need money, or approval from.