✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 3,653 words · saved by 1 readers

Comment by lukeprog - Eliezer, When I wrote the post I didn't know that what you meant by "reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy" was only the very narrow thing of dissolving philosophical problems to cognitive algorithms. After all, most of the useful philosophy you've done on Less Wrong is not specifically related to that very particular thing... which again supports my point that mainstream philosophy has more to offer than dissolution-to-algorithm. (Unless you think most of your philosophical writing on Less Wrong is useless.) Also, I don't disagree with your decision not to cover means and ends in CEV. Anyway. Here are some useful contributions of mainstream philosophy: * Quine's naturalized epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of cognitive science: that's where recursive justification hits bottom, in the lens that sees its flaws. * Tarski on language and truth. One of Tarski's papers on truth recently ranked as the 4th most important philosophy paper of the 20th century by a survey of philosophers. Philosophers have much developed Tarski's account since then, of course. * Chalmers' formalization of Good's intelligence explosion argument. Good's 1965 paper was important, but it presented no systematic argument; only hand-waving. Chalmers breaks down Good's argument into parts and examines the plausibility of each part in turn, considers the plausibility of various defeaters and possible paths, and makes a more organized and compelling case for Good's intelligence explosion than anybody at SIAI has. * Dennett on belief in belief. Used regularly on Less Wrong. * Bratman on intention. Bratman's 1987 book on intention has been a major inspiration to AI researchers working on belief-desire-intention models of intelligent behavior. See, for example, pages 60-61 and 1041 of AIMA (3rd ed.). * Functionalism and multiple realizability. The philosophy of mind most natural to AI was introduced and developed by Putnam and Lewis in the 1960s, and more recently by Dennet

x Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy — LessWrong Rationality and Philosophy Philosophy Scholarship & Learning Site Meta Frontpage 170 Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy by lukeprog 20th Mar 2011 6 min read 334 170 Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy Despite Yudkowsky's distaste for mainstream philosophy, Less Wrong is largely a philosophy blog. Major topics include epistemology , philosophy of language , free will , metaphysics , metaethics , normative ethics , machine ethics , axiology , philosophy of mind , and more. Moreover, standard Less Wrong posi

Explore this link on the map →

related reading