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What I'd change about different philosophy fields

lesswrong.com · 6,769 words · saved by 1 readers

[epistemic status: speculative conversation-starter] My guess at the memetic shifts that would do the most to improve these philosophy fields' tendency to converge on truth: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- METAPHYSICS 1. Make reductive, 'third-person' models of the brain central to metaphysics discussion. If you claim that humans can come to know X, then you should be able to provide a story sketch in the third person for how a physical, deterministic, evolved organism could end up learning X. You don't have to go into exact neuroscientific detail, but it should be clear how a mechanistic cause-and-effect chain could result in a toy agent verifying the truth of X within a physical universe. 2. Care less about human intuitions and concepts. Care more about the actual subject matter of metaphysics — ultimate, objective reality. E.g., only care about the concept 'truth' insofar as we have strong reason to think an alien would arrive at the exact same concept, because it's carving nature closer to its joints. Conduct more tests to see which concepts look more joint-carving than others. (I think current analytic metaphysics is actually better at 'not caring about human intuitions and concepts' than most other philosophy fields. I just think this is still the field's biggest area for future improvement, partly because it's harder to do this right in metaphysics.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DECISION THEORY Similar to metaphysics, it should be more expected that we think of decision theories in third-person terms. Can we build toy models of a hypothetical alien or robot that actually implements this decision procedure? In metaphysics, doing this helps us confirm that a claim is coherent and knowable. In decision theory, there's an even larger benefit: a lot of issues that are central to the field (e.g., logical uncertainty and counterlogicals) are easy to mi

x What I'd change about different philosophy fields — LessWrong Philosophy Decision theory Epistemology Ethics & Morality Phenomenology Reflective Reasoning Religion World Modeling Frontpage 57 What I'd change about different philosophy fields by Rob Bensinger 8th Mar 2021 5 min read 52 57 [epistemic status: speculative conversation-starter] My guess at the memetic shifts that would do the most to improve these philosophy fields' tendency to converge on truth: metaphysics 1. Make reductive, 'third-person' models of the brain central to metaphysics discussion. If you claim that humans can come

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