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Some mixed questions

Russell_Fan
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 04/14/09 - 09:26 AM: Subject: Some mixed questions	#1
Professor Chalmers 1) How likely do you evaluate the possibility that the constituents of consciousness are not relationally related, that is, they are only internally determined (a position I know to be compatible, as you many times explained, with russellian panprotopsiquism) ? In other words, do you think that, differently from what happens to qualia, where being in the epistemological state is equal to there being the quale, that there could be "misunderstanding" "illusion" "confusion" that made us believe that they have relations to one-another, when in fact they don't? 2) How many pages do you read a day? and how many do you write? 3) Do you think that the content of a belief about X is the same as the content of the sentence that best translates the belief about X? (that seems implied by some of your articles) 4) Best thing about doing philosophy? 5) Whithin the scope of science, what are the most important things a philosopher should know and understand well? 6) Any comments on the singularity? Transhumanism, and futurism in general? Thank you for the time

davidchalmers
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Posted 05/09/09 - 08:24 PM:	#2
Hi Russell_Fan (1) I don't quite follow this. Maybe you can rephrase. (2) I read a lot. Much of it is online these days, e.g. recent online articles. I also subscribe to a lot of philosophy journals and receive a lot of philosophy books, and have copies around the house to read when I feel like it. No idea how many pages, though. As for writing, this is quite variable. I can go months without writing anything of significance, and then I can write two articles in a week. When I write, I prefer to devote myself to writing, and not to do anything else that day if I can help it. I'd prefer it if I were the sort of philosopher who can write for a limited period every day and then relax, but this seems to be the way that I am. (3) I suppose so. Perhaps there are beliefs whose content doesn't correspond precisely to any sentence in a public language such as English. But I think that in principle any belief can be expressed linguistically, if only in a language of one's own devising. Perhaps more relevantly in my own work, I also think that the content of sentences in public language derives ultimately from the content of beliefs (and other thoughts) that these sentences are used to express. (4) There are many good things about doing philosophy. But perhaps most central for me is that one gets to think about whatever one wants to think about. For someone like me who is interested in foundational questions, one can ask foundational questions about almost anything, and one finds that one is doing philosophy. So one gets to think about all sort of interesting topics, and to talk about them with all sorts of interesting people. In other academic areas, one also gets to think about very interesting things, but as a rule one is more constrained. Of course this doesn't mean that one should be a dilettante -- one needs to really focus and dig deeply in certain areas. But it's nice to also have the freedom to roam at the same time. (5) This depends on what sort of philosophy one is doing. In the philosophy of mind, it's most important to know psychology and neuroscience. Which bits of psychology and neuroscience depend on what sort of philosophy of mind. In metaphysics, it's often useful to know a reasonable amount of physics. In the philosophy of language, philosophers increasingly rely on work in linguistics. Even in ethics, work from social psychology is increasigly relevant. Of course if you are doing philosophy of science (and especially philosophy of a particular science), you'll usually need to know a lot of science, and increasingly detailed knowledge seems to be the norm these days. But for a general philosophical education, basic physics, biology, and cognitive science, of the sort you can get from a good popular treatment of these topics, is a good start. (6) I'm a fan of the singularity. Like many people, I recall thinking something along these lines before hearing about the idea from others. The key idea is the intelligence explosion -- that once we make creatures smarter than us, they'll be better than us at making smart creatures, so they'll make creatures smarter than them, and off you go. I'm not wild about some of the ancillary ideas that have become associated with the singularity idea more recently -- e.g. optimism about how soon it will happen. As far as I can tell, despite advances in hardware, the big bottleneck in AI has always been the software (that is, the algorithms), and as far as I can tell we aren't a whole lot closer there than we were twenty years ago when I was a graduate student. Probably evolutionary methods are most likely to get us there first, but even here progress has been limited. As for transhumanism and futurism, I'm pretty interested in speculation here. I'm inclined to take most specific predictions with a grain of salt 00 but then, for a philosopher, the speculations are interesting whether or not they come true. They serve as thought-experiments, perhaps a little more grounded in reality than some philosophical thought-experiments. I have a paper on the Matrix that takes this approach. I have it in mind that perhaps one day I will write a relatively accessible book that explores many philosophical topics through the lens of the Matrix, AI, and other broadly futuristic topics.

Russell_Fan
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Posted 06/11/09 - 01:48 PM:	#3
It may be a little late for that, but I will rephrase: 1) You have spoken in a fairly positive spirit about Russellian panprotopsychism. Also, you have defended property dualism more broadly. I understand that to be roughly: Every material thing has phenomenal properties instrinsically. Physical aspects are relational, compositional, extrinsic, etc... (In particular if the Math Univ Hypothesis is true) If phenomenal qualities are intrinsic, they are not supposed to have relational properties. They cannot, for instance, be to the left of, to the right of, etc... intrinsic is intrinsic. All their relations are internal. So, for such a view to be the case, one would have to defend that the apparent relation-ness of qualia in a visual field is a sort of cognitive illusion. There is no such thing as an orange quale that is illusional according to your view or kripke's. Do you think, on the other hand, that the quale might be there, but the seeming relation of "being above the red quale in my visual field" is in fact an illusion? If you don't, if you think the relation also holds the implication from "seeming to be there" to "being there", than you have abandoned panprotopsichism, inserting relations where they are not allowed. That is the spirit of my concern. I have a new question: 2) What do you think of the work by Nick Bostrom on the SSA, self-recognizing belief etc...

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