“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.”
-Patrick Hayden
The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?
Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
I'll take the time to work through my problems thanks.
You personally might rather live a vastly extended span than spend the time you do have skydiving, parasailing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever it is that allows you to enjoy your life to its fullest for however long you have. But that's a real, legitimate choice, and choosing to take risks and experience everything you can is a perfectly valid choice -- even if there's a very real risk that something will go wrong at some point and you will indeed "die screaming."
Given a longer life, I think we would come up with new ways to motivate ourselves, and new challenges. This isn't an insoluble problem, it's a business opportunity for Tony Robbins.
That said I'm not sure a human being could ever fully escape ennui, so maybe there is some upper limit. I don't think 80 years is even close though.
What would happen to religion? Do you choose to continue aging, die, and take your chances with the heaven you've been saying exists, or do you take the new pill, and live forever? If you take the pill, what does that say about your faith in the afterlife?
Do we fear death even more? If I'm going to die in a few decades of old age as my health deteriorates, I might as well enjoy my prime, and take some risks now. If I die, well, no big deal, I was going to die soon enough anyway. If I'm married, 60 years old, and my wife dies, that would be a sad day, but let's not kid ourselves, we're getting old. If your grandma passes away, well, it was her time, she lived a long life.
But, if we live forever, we fear those accidents. If your wife dies in a plane crash age 60, how does that affect you? You might have expected to spend the next ten thousand years together, and she's gone. Do we stop taking these risks? Do I step in a car, or on a plane? I'm willing to take that risk now, but if I knew I could potentially live forever, I wouldn't want to risk dying with so much time still remaining.
Do we enter the world of virtual reality? Why leave my home, I could get hit by lightning, I could get shot walking down the street, hit by a car, or attacked by animals. Why don't I lock myself in an underground bunker facility, and connect to the world through virtual reality? I toss on the goggles, and I enter the VR world where I meet with friends and family, and go on wild adventures, because I can take these risks in the VR world. If I die, I respawn. My body is safe in the bunker, while I pretend to be outside.
If anything, I vote for the simulated reality thing. Its like once you are dead, they should be able to take your brain out and connect it to a simulated paradise which would run forever.
(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
We do ask philosophers about "right to die" and "permissibility of stem cell research from humans". Philosophers outline the conditions under which we rationally approach these things — they obviously do not license or themselves permit such behavior. No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay... I'm just not sure what to say here. That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality.
They inform ultimately what becomes legislation. Bertrand Russell was all over popular science in the 20th century. So was Bernard Williams. Dworkin. HLA Hart. The countless articles on ethics on JSTOR. All the philosophical journals. Stacks and stacks on anthologies collecting debates on abortion. ExPhi puts current opinion in the context of great thinkers of the history of philosophy, and helps us understand why we have the opinions we do have.
We don't ask them to describe the scientific innerworkings of these techniques. We do ask them to explain these things in broader cultural terms, and in that case the Scientist often times plays Philosopher, where that person so too must pick up a great work of Philosophy.
Ethics Committees are real things. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's radically in error and shockingly misleading...
I've seen counter-examples of this in newspapers, where they have them weigh in with their opinion (on the news pages, not editorial), being quoted as an expert.
Being an expert on ethics and describing one's stance is more than just opinion. It's a trade. We expect philosophers to have distinguished opinions, opinions they have defended and examined, partly inherited from history of philosophy itself. A philosopher can give its personal opinion, but usually they identify it as such. We do often want to know what the person thinks, in which case we're asking the person, not the philosopher. The person just so happens to talk like they do most of the time.
A lot of it is American anti-intellectualism. We very strongly object to the idea that the challenges and struggles central to our lives are not unique but have actually been fully considered by others, maybe even centuries prior. That would mean we aren't the author and star of a uniquely great story.
Of course, if that person went to Orel Roberts University then we'll gladly listen and believe every dumb thing he has to say.
Yes, many people. In civilised countries that are not all about "pop culture" and where science is not supposed to be half about marketing stuff to people -- people very much care what philosophers think about those issues.
In fact, what people care is what THEY think about those issues (that is, they want to make up their mind).
In this context, philosophers are essentially just more devoted thinkers, with a better command of the history of ideas, so people use them as guides.
Now, in the US, it's mostly pop culture, low quality op-eds and marketing/advertising driving the popular understanding of such matters.
I guess the equivalent would be NYT best-seller non fiction books (still, quite a low standard).
Name one.
The overlap in philosophy of the mind and computer science is also particularly striking. I studied both in university and often found myself taking what amounted to the same class at the same time, but in two different departments. I work quite a bit with machine learning nowadays, and I learned 90% of the background I needed in my higher level philosophy courses, not my CS courses. I have often thought of CS as something along the lines of "applied philosophy".
Obviously, this is not meant to be disparaging towards CS. I love CS and it is what I have made a career in; I think they are different, but equally interesting and useful.
Useful bits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori
Then go the other way (Assuming you know relational database theory):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#...
You'll find the two concepts meet somewhere around
Philosophy of Mind probably has the closest connection to ML in particular though, as most of the course I took anyway was devoted to Turing Machines, neural networks, etc.
As far as general CS goes, Symbolic Logic is the most essential. Most CS programs cover this stuff, but subjects that might get a 1 week treatment in a typical Discrete Mathematics course would get a full semester in a typical Philosophy program.
As far as general scientific thought and skepticism go, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, and Biology are key. If you want to dip your toes in this sort of thing, check out Francis Bacon and the falsification principle, along with Thomas Kuhn and his theory of scientific revolutions and paradigms.
One last note: most people think about philosophy in terms of broad prescriptive pronouncements. Think Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Kant, etc. Most contemporary philosophers are more concerned with specific analysis of claims made by a paradigm, in which they explore whether or not these claims a) mean anything b) are internally consistent and c) lead to further implications. Coming out and making some completely new claim is exceedingly rare. An example of this (a bit contrived) in the context of ML and Biology would go something like:
1) Computer Scientists claim that neural network algorithms mimic biological brains. 2) What do we actually know about how biological neural networks work? 3) How do neural network algorithms typically mimic this? 4) Based on the current research, it turns out that neural networks in algorithms differ from their biological counterparts in X, Y, and Z ways. 5) Based on the efficacy these algorithms, how can we explain their ability to "walk like a duck and quack like a duck" without actually being ducks? 6) Assuming a reasonable advancement of this technology, is it reasonable to believe that we may reach a point when X, Y, and Z might be addressed?
TLDR: if you got bored reading what I wrote above, you will probably abhor the ridiculous density and verbosity of most contemporary philosophy. Hey, I tried :)
But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.
There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion.
Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.
It isn't anti-intellectual to question the validity of any analysis. Your argument, taken to its conclusion, provides as much protection for the previously mentioned analysis of Miley Cyrus's dance being a grounded argument to make, as it does for my claim that she was subconsciously invoking the goddess Kali.
You'd be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap.
But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting.
And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don't work properly, there's a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that's perfectly logical.
To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it.
Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly "imprecise" language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.