While I was reading a book on the history of philosophy (1/3 through it), I became interested in philosophy in general.
I enrolled in a Coursera course Philosophy for Everyone, which seemed to be very popular. There’s also a book for it. In this post I will write an overview of every week and what I learned.
The way I consumed the content was to first read the handouts, write a quick review of them on this blog, and then continue by watching the videos.
Week 1
Philosophy is about stepping back out of a particular subject (e.g. physics) and questioning (recursively asking why) the things that we are doing when we do physics. Philosophy is the activity of figuring out the best way to think about things. A philosophical idea contains both vision and arguments that prove it.
Week 2
Morality: Objective, Relative, or Emotive?
Empirical judgments (objective) are ones that we know for a fact, e.g. 2+2=4. Moral judgments (subjective) are cultural or personal, e.g. “Blue is a happy color”.
Three approaches to moral judgments: objectivism (true/false objectively), relativism (true/false relatively), emotivism (not true/false, rather a direct result of our emotions)
Which of these is right is a foundational q for Meta-ethics (moral philosophy)
What is Knowledge? And Do We Have Any?
Knowledge-that (propositional knowledge) is things like knowing that Paris is the capital of France. Knowledge-how (ability knowledge) is things like knowing how to play a video game.
Knowledge-that has two conditions:
- Truth – If I know that Paris is the capital of France, then Paris has to be the capital of France
- Belief – Unless I believe that Paris is the capital of France, I’m not even in the market of knowledge.
Classical account of knowledge (Plato): Adding justification to belief gives knowledge:
- You have a belief
- The belief is true
- You have a justification for that belief (good reasons why it’s true)
However, Gettier in the 1960s published a paper saying that knowledge cannot be merely justified by true belief: it is a matter of luck whether a belief is true – Gettier-style case. There’s a general formula to constructing a Gettier-style case, by taking a belief that is justified but where ordinarily even though it is justified, the belief would be false. There isn’t a simple fix to this.
Radical skepticism is the view that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we
do. It is not about a “local” truth, but rather about a general universal truth. So, radical skepticism is the view that we know very little about a world that is external to us. Once we step outside the “local” world and start to reflect in a very general way, we discover that we don’t have such a grip on the truth of reality as we thought we did.
We can say the words and so on, but actually to […] fully believe that one really knows nothing. […] I’m not sure that’s even psychologically possible.
Week 3
Do We Have an Obligation to Obey the Law
Political philosophy is the study of the relationship between a state and its citizens.
We have obligations to comply with the law but not necessarily obey the law:
- Comply: Doing what the law commands
- Obey: Doing what the law commands because the law commands it
Grounds of political obligation: why do we have an obligation to obey the state and its laws? Even if we have an obligation to obey the law, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily what we must do. One answer to political obligation because of gratitude/benefit.
Benefit theory: Hypothesis: Citizens are benefitted from the state. Conclusion: Because of this, they have an obligation to obey it.
But does being benefitted always generate obligations i.e. does it generate obligations to obey? Suppose a random stranger washes your car for free, and your response “um.. thanks” – does this generate an obligation? They just cleaned your car without asking for your permission. Maybe an obligation to express gratitude, but not to obey. Thus the conclusion of the benefit theory is not always true.
Consent theory: We have an obligation to obey the state because we have consented (agreed/sworn allegiance) to the state and to have such obligations to it.
Main problems of the consent theory: Insufficient people have given consent, consent only generates obligations if one is able to withhold consent (if we have no ability to withhold consent, then we can’t consent to the state given that we have no effective alternative).
Fairness theory: Citizens are a part of cooperative schemes that are mutually beneficial and fair. This theory can explain why we don’t have an obligation to obey corrupt states even if in some cases we benefit from them.
Problems with fairness theory: One typically joins cooperative schemes by choice (states are not like this – we are born in them and have no choice), and we’re limited by our ability to leave the state.
If the problem of political obligation cannot be solved, then philosophical anarchism is true – no obligation to obey the law but still have many obligations to comply with the law.
Should You Believe What You Hear?
Philosophers use the term ‘testimony’ to refer to any situation in which you believe something on the basis of what someone else asserts, either verbally or in writing.
Evidentialism per Hume: Only trust testimony when you have evidence that the testifier is likely to be right. Another assumption per Hume: people are often wrong when they testify. Miracles per Hume: an event that is an exception to a previously exceptionless regularity.
Hume’s view on trusting testimony only from a verified tester is challenged by a minister of a Church called Reid: Trusting testimony is analogous to trusting your senses. The thing is that we don’t only use our senses when we have evidence for something that is likely to be true. There are innate principles that govern how we think and feel, including an innate principle of credulity that makes us trust other people’s testimony. For Reid, just as we are naturally trusting creatures, we are naturally honest creatures.
No proposition that is uttered in discourse would be believed[, and] such distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society, and place us in a worse condition than that of the savages.
Reid claims, if we abided by Hume’s principles
Week 4
Minds, Brains, and Computers
Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to answer a lot of the questions that we pose because that’s the nature of philosophy. We’re looking at questions and we’re trying to work out what good questions there are to ask.
Dr. Suilin Lavelle
A ball’s existence revolves around being beaten around, maybe getting rained on, and that’s not very much interesting. Dogs are more interesting – they get up from sleep, think about food, get the owner’s attention, etc. Humans are similar to dogs, but we’re more than that: we can think about things that are around us, we can evaluate our thoughts (think about how we think), plan for the future (evaluate some non-existent states), etc. Here’s the tricky bit: how do we capture the aboutness of a thought?
Cartesian dualism: mind is immaterial, body is material.
The problem of causation: Princess Elisabeth argues that physical things can only be changed by interaction with other physical things. According to her, thoughts, beliefs, and desires can cause particular behaviors which happen in physical bodies.
1. I can doubt the existence of everything around me
Descartes’ argument from doubt
2. I cannot doubt the existence of my thoughts (my mind)
3. Therefore, my mind must be made from something fundamentally different.
From the argument of doubt: I can imagine that the physical world does not exist, but it is impossible for me to imagine that I don’t exist because there has to be something that is doing the imagining! Hence the famous Cogito: I think therefore I am. Leibniz argues that there is a distinction between doubt and mind: Descartes’ argument tells us stuff about doubt, but not about the mind.
Physicalism/materialism is the view that everything that exists is physical stuff (stuff that has an extension). Identity Theory: Thoughts are identical to some physical state in our body/brain. Type-identity theory: types of mental phenomena are identical to types of physical phenomena. Token-identity theory: instances (tokens) of mental phenomena are identical to physical phenomena.
Multiple realisability: Putnam argues the preceding points by stating that any mental state can be instantiated in a variety of different physical systems. This leads to the idea of Functionalism – rather than explaining what things are made of, we explain what they do. For example, chairs are made of different materials, but the important thing is the job that they do.
Functionalism now allows us to talk about the idea of treating the mind as a computer – not what they’re made of but what they do.
If minds are computing machines, then how complex does an information-processing system need to be before it counts as a mind?
Turing answers this question by the Turing test: if a computer can consistently fool the interrogator into believing that it is a human, then the computer has reached the level of functional complexity required for having a mind.
However, the Turing test is not sufficient for finding a thinking machine because it doesn’t take into account the internal structure of the machine. Consider a structure where if we ask a computer “what’s 1+2” or “how do you like your martinis: shaken or stirred”, it will search through a large database, find the corresponding file, and provide that as an answer – wouldn’t exactly count that a thinking machine. Another objection is that the test might be too limited – maybe there are beings who are not humans but can still count as minded.
Chinese room: you are in a sealed room whose walls are lined with books containing Chinese symbols, and assume that you don’t know Chinese at all. There is a slot in which occasionally a piece of paper will come out of it. In addition, we are given a rule book in English that contains a set of rules that tells us what to do when we see a particular pattern in Chinese. Now, imagine there is a Chinese person who is sending us these messages. To them, it would be unknown that we don’t really know Chinese, even though they see we do the exact thing they ask us.
The Chinese room example shows how computers work, and it challenges the idea that the mind is a computer because computers work by processing symbols, and symbols have syntactic and semantic properties. That is, computers are only sensitive to the syntactic properties of symbols.
The problem is that the computer does not ‘know’ that it is manipulating symbols that have semantic content any more than the person inside [the] Chinese room knows [they’re] manipulating Chinese characters. […] With a computer it doesn’t matter that the machine’s processing has nothing to do with the semantic content of the symbols, because it is the humans who use the machine that have this information, we are the ones who give meaning to those symbols.
Representation as three-way relation: X represents Y to Z. E.g., 2+2 represents 4 to a Python REPL. But 2+2 represents 2+2 in Notepad. And when it comes to minds, it’s not clear what fills the place of Z.
Are Scientific Theories True?
Two major views for the aims of science:
- Scientific realism: Despite providing a good description/analysis, it also aims to give a true story about those phenomena by explaining unobservable objects such as DNA, proton, etc. Scientific realists believe both what a scientific theory says about observables and unobservables.
- Semantic aspect: the language of scientific theories – the terms of a theory and how they should be understood.
- Epistemic aspect: our attitude towards scientific theories – what we believe about a theory when we accept it.
- Scientific anti-realism: Science aims at saving the phenomena – provide a good description/analysis of the available scientific data and observations. Scientific antirealists believe what a scientific theory says about observables, but not about unobservables.
- Constructive empiricism: Agree with the semantic aspect of scientific realism, but not with the epistemic aspect – i.e. we don’t need to believe a theory to be true for it to be good. Empiricism is about working with the evidence and what we can observe, instead of going beyond and claiming to understand the unobservable
- Example: minerals – we can observe melting point, etc. but we cannot observe the number of atoms yet we still work with models like this
So constructive empiricism would insist that scientific theories not to be true in order to be good, they only need to be empirically adequate. And a theory is empirically adequate if whatever the theory says about observable things and events in the world (past, present, and future) is true. […] Abstraction and idealization enter into the construction of models so that although the models are very useful and explanatory tools in everyday practice, they may not necessarily be the true of states of affairs in the world, if not in a very idealized sense or in very idealized circumstances
For ancient Greeks, the aim of astronomy was not to provide a true story about planetary motion, but just to save/explain the appearances (Scientific anti-realism). In 1543, Copernicus presented his hypothesis just as another hypothesis that can save appearances, tho in a more promising way than his predecessors. Galileo was the first person to say that the purpose of science, besides saving the phenomena, is to provide a true story of phenomena (Scientific realism).
Scientific realism is more metaphysically committed than constructive empiricism. This, says the constructive empiricist, is risky. Scientific theories are continually being replaced by new theories, so unobserved entities figuring in today’s successful scientific theories – for example, neutrinos – might turn out to be non-existent according to future scientific theories. This would make scientific realism false, but not constructive empiricism. The constructive empiricist takes not having this metaphysical commitment to the existence of unobserved entities to be a theoretical advantage for her view.
But the scientific realist would oppose to that with “One thing is to explain why only successful theory survives, another thing is to explain what makes a theory successful”. The theory that survives is so because it’s true.
The idea behind inference to the best explanation is that we infer the hypothesis which would if true, provide the best explanation of the available evidence. Inference of the best explanation is a powerful tool in the scientific realist toolkit.
Week 5
Do We Have Free Will and Does It Matter?
What is determinism (mechanism)? The idea is that everything that happens is determined (fixed completely) by the preceding physical conditions. That is, the way things are to happen is already determined by what happened before.
Physical conditions in life are mostly easy to explain why they happened (the ball bounced because it was dropped) but higher complexity when people are involved. Action caused by a decision caused by a background conditions. E.g. Decision to raise my arm (caused by) giving this lecture (caused by) my job, my personality, … (caused by) past decisions (caused by) the kind of person I am (caused by) genes, environment, upbringing.
So I’m a determined being too. In the end, a simple decision like to raise my arms comes from things that are completely outside me and causal chains that started a long, long time ago.
But if there’s … -> cause -> cause -> cause -> move my arm (effect), then it seems like there’s an important sense in which we’re not free. Determinism: Everything by the effect is explained by the cause.
Fate: a specific thing is fixed. Determinism: everything is fixed.
Three main responses from philosophers:
- Libertarianism – we do have free will. It feels like we’re free, but feel free != being free – we need something more. Main argument: We are causes outside of the usual causal chain; although we cause things in the usual way, the way in which we are caused, is very different. Agents are capable of agent causation – a special kind of causation that’s free, that originates in the agent.
- Compatibilism – we don’t have free will but it doesn’t matter. We nonetheless have moral responsibility. Per Hume: Being free != being constrained, think about freedom in sense of e.g. being able to walk around, rather than determinism. Seems like changing the topic, but the insight is: What matters is how and what we decide what to do.
- Hard determinism – we don’t have free will and it does matter. Determinism is true and we don’t have moral responsibility. Our character is not chosen by us -> we are not free. Goes back to determinism – the hard determinists didn’t really advance the debate.
Making your own mind up because of your own reasons is what makes you morally responsible; not the fact that you could have done something else
Harry Frankfurt
Conclusion
There are no clear-cut answers to philosophical questions, nor there is a simple solution to them. Philosophy isn’t about learning some concrete skill, it’s rather abstract, and it’s not about learning what other philosophers have said/done, but it’s more about learning how to think philosophically.
Programmers tend to complain about how their systems aren’t properly designed, don’t have proper abstractions, etc. This course made me think about how hard it is to construct systems in real life. We cannot design the perfect system, but programming seems to come “close” to it 🙂 At least much closer than other branches.
Nevertheless, it was fun and at times magical to watch and think about the debates of various philosophies. I can’t say that I learned some specific skills (e.g. riding a bike), but I believe that this course definitely improved my thought process.
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