Let's say I want to get into music and I start playing guitar and learning how to sing. Naturally, there is going to be a learning curve between the time when I start learning those skill and the time when I can not only compose coherent music, but perform it in its complete form. I would say you are a musician when you have reached the latter point. — Garrett Travers

That's a very high standard. What reasons/believes are behind this assertion?

In my view, you become a musician as soon as you hit that first note on your guitar. I'm invested in rock music. I recently listened to two interviews with successful musicians Tom Morello and Dave Grohl. Both recalled the days they first played their instruments as the days their journeys as musicians started. Even more so, Dave Grohl started drumming even before he got his first drum kit. He had an unusual habit of drumming using only his teeth. When I'm thinking of young Dave playing songs using his teeth on his way to school, I'm seeing a musician in him.

Overall, I see this problem as an instance of the sorites paradox. It's easy to know a musician, but there is no reliable way to determine the exact moment the transition happened. Because there is no objective way to answer this question, I've settled on a subjective approach:

Someone becomes a musician/philosopher as soon as they start identifying themself as a musician/philosopher.

It's not a perfect definition, but it's practical. Its main significance is to protect a moral belief that I have. I believe that it is wrong to strip people of their identity. If someone identifies as a musician/philosopher, I think it is wrong for others to claim otherwise. It is still fine to omit this detail when it has low relevance. If someone claims to be a musician but they never play music, there is no value in referring to them as a musician. But we also should refrain from claiming that they aren't a musician. We can only make more specific claims, e.g. they are not a professional musician because they are not making money with music, or they are not proficient in music theory, etc.

My conclusion is that the following are not the right questions to ask: "What constitutes a philosopher?", "When does one become a philosopher?". Some better questions would be: "How does one become known as a philosopher?", "What makes a philosopher great?", "What is it like to be a philosopher?"

Studies suggest that we are gradually becoming less intelligent — L'éléphant

How do these studies define and measure intelligence?

This reminds me of court hearings, where both prosecution and defense try to paint the most exaggerated versions events, which has little to do with the reality. One either plays by these bizarre rules or gets smashed by the system. Has this ever been discussed on the forum?

Have you provided an example where a falsehood was useful? — Harry Hindu

The pragmatical approach to knowledge doesn't see things as true or false. In order to provide an example of a falsehood, it is necessary to make a judgement about trueness. This would defeat the point the OP.

In other words, consider the following alternative conversation:

A: God doesn't exist. We need to focus on what's good for humans.
B: Seems to me that for something to be good for humans it needs to be blessed by God. Have you provided an example where something not blessed by God was useful?

To answer B's question, A needs to presuppose that God exists, which would go against A's convictions.

Some people argue that we shouldn't be accepting our mortality at all. They say that we already have the technology advanced enough to defeat ageing. The only thing that stops us is the widespread idea that ageing and dying is just a part of life. They even go as far as to say that we should announce ageing to be a disease, and we should fund the research to cure it. Unfortunately, there is very little funding to it compared to other diseases.

Curing ageing would not guarantee mortality, but it sounds like a good first step. If you're interested, I recommend the work of David A. Sinclair, particularly his book Lifespan. Here are a few videos on this topic: Why Die?, How to Cure Aging – During Your Lifetime?

The internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy characterizes ethics thus: "The field of ethics (or moral philosophy) involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior." <...> Math is, after all, nothing more than a sytematized approach <...>. And science, after all, is nothing more than the systematized approach <...> So, why is ethics treated any differently? — Garrett Travers

The encyclopedia says that the field of ethics involves systematizing. It doesn't say that ethics is nothing more than systematizing.

It's an interesting way to look at ethics, but my intuition and experience tells me that there are reason why people are arguing about ethics. It's easy to reframe the definition and claim that there is no point in arguing, but that wouldn't stop the argument. It would only stop you from participating. As someone studying philosophy, you should get comfortable with engaging in argument for the sake of it, and not to win it or stop it from happening :smile:

What does change are distances. A change in spatial distance is a change in time. — Cornwell1

Unfortunately, distance between two points p1 and p2 cannot be measured at a given time t0. To measure distance, we need to move between point p1 and point p2. Movement requires time, as nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Distance doesn't exist in the Universe, as it is something that occurs through time.

Nevertheless, one can still create the idea of 'change' by using an indexical such as 'this' to refer to two or more referents, as when recognising that the colour of an object has changed - something that is objectively nonsense for the reasons you point out, and yet subjectively meaningful. — sime

I can play by these rules, thank you.

Perhaps one can say that the mind is change — sime

That would make sense, but it also wouldn't tell us much :wink:

All of you must be talking nonsense. It's easy to demonstrate that nothing can change in space. How can the same thing exist in two different positions? It's also easy to demonstrate that nothing can change in time. How can the same thing exist in two different points in time? It must be two very similar things, but they are not the same, since they exist at different times. There is no such thing as change.

Has humanity achieved self-actualization? If it has and if it will the next stage is transcendence (the tip of the Maslow's pyramid). Are we to become gods? — Agent Smith

If a human became god, they would only strive to become mortal again

And you should learn to read between the lines :joke:

I got no beef with you. For someone who is interested in the knowledge, it surprises me that you actively disregard the knowledge of others (by calling it "fairy tales"), instead of absorbing it but not using it.

To make this your bedrock of knowledge is turning knowledge into a slave. I'm more interested in the knowledge itself. Who cares how you arrive on it? The ignorant, maybe...

"Of course you will use your knowledge." If I don't wanna use it I don't use it. I like knowledge for what it is. Knowledge. Falling in coma will indeed avoid me from experiencing that. — Cornwell1

I love the absurdity of arguing against fairy tales and ignorance by telling fairy tales and embracing ignorance. Brilliant!

A small scale philosopher? Is that like being partly pregnant? :smile: — Tom Storm

Haha, I couldn't think of a better way to frame it. I meant the scale of "me and the few other people who I can discuss philosophy with." The scale that is not publicly significant.

I would never say contributing something new is critical, but I would consider that knowing something about how philosophical questions have been approached previously is. — Tom Storm

Is there any way to tell if someone has enough knowledge about how philosophical questions have been approached in the past? Would it suffice if they arrived at this knowledge on their own, rather than by studying historical records?

My goal is to clarify, but not to challenge or dismiss.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of philosophers who actually pioneer new philosophies and epistemologies — Garrett Travers

Thank you for articulating your view. That's a great way of looking at things, and definitely practical for the people studying philosophy. I will attempt to expand on it and articulate other views that I think exist out there. I don't think any of these views is better or more correct than any other. I accept all of them, and my only interest is to acknowledge them.

Here is how I draw an analogy with the musical world. There are three roles that I can identify:

• Composer writes new music
• Performer entertains others by playing music
• Listener enjoys music

A single person can assume multiple roles. Each role is associated with different types and levels of skills. Composers are creative people who bring something new to the world. Performers are skilful people who apply their skills for the benefit of self and others. Listeners are the people who have a taste in music. Although a lot of music doesn't require a skilful listener, I would argue that listening to the music is also a skill that can be developed.

I can see how these roles also exist in the world of philosophy, and they create different ways to view people as philosophers:

• [Composer] In academia, a philosopher is someone who's contributed something new to the field of philosophy. This is a practical view in the academic world. When you study philosophy, the people who are relevant to you are the ones who contributed at least in some way to the field of philosophy.
• [Performer] In the public eye, a philosopher is someone who knows philosophy and applies philosophical thinking to social issues. The term 'philosopher´ will be used by the media to refer to the people who bring a philosophical perspective to the conversation. In this context it's less relevant whether someone has contributed to the field of philosophy. What's relevant is how they have contributed to the society.
• [Listener] On a smaller scale, a philosopher is someone who dedicates their time to engage in philosophical thinking. A person can make philosophy a part of their identity if they're spending a lot of their time wrestling with philosophical questions. For the person, it's not relevant whether they can contribute something new to the field of philosophy or whether they contribute to the society. What's relevant is that they spend their time thinking about philosophy, which makes philosophy a part of their identity.

As I mentioned earlier, these views are different from one another, but I don't think that only one of them must be true, while the rest are false. My only goal is to acknowledge them.

That's a great way to put it!

Do you think there is an analogy to the musical world? In the musical world, there are people who contribute by writing new music, developing new techniques and creating new genres, and there are also performers who arguably don't contribute something new to the field, but they are still called musicians for their skill and proficiency. Is there an analogy in the field of philosophy?

No, they would both still be philosophers, if they meet the criteria set out in quote two there. It isn't about drawing the same conclusions, or not. What I said earlier was that you can engage with philosophical thought without being a phiosopher, the conclusion drawing bit was just an example of how that could happen. What defines a philosopher is contained in the second of my quotes you provided. Use that as a reference to quote one. — Garrett Travers

Forgive me, I made a false connection between conclusions and contributions. I meant to aks: If two people offer the same contribution to the field, would only one of them contributing something new to the field? Would this make only one of them a philosopher?

Of course, you may end up just drawing conclusions drawn by philosophers long ago — Garrett Travers

when ones knowledge, command, skill, or profiency on the subject is able to be utilized by the individual to contribute something new to the field — Garrett Travers

If two people independently drew the same conclusion in the field of philosophy, would only one of them become a philosopher, the one who did it earlier than the other? Or perhaps the one who reached a broader audience?

I have no problem regarding myself as a philosopher, as that is my field of study and the school of thought I hope to contribute to — Garrett Travers

Can one study philosophy without becoming a philosopher? Can one engage in philosophical thinking without contributing to a philosophical school of thought? What is the exact moment when one becomes a philosopher?

Sorry, I wasn't sure who the question was directed to. I also wasn't sure what kind of answer you were looking for. Personally, I don't believe that there is a single perfect definition for the term, as for many other terms. A term is defined by how it's used, and by its relationship to all other terms in the language. You can generally understand it, but you cannot point exactly at where the term begins and where it ends.

If I was to give a definition, I would go for something ambiguous, e.g. a philosopher is someone who thinks about life.

Here is the definition of a phisolopher:

someone who studies or writes about the meaning of life

Does this change your determination of what a philosopher is?

Your mother owes you an apology. — Garrett Travers

Perhaps. And perhaps you owe an apology to Bernie Sanders, Jordan Peterson, Freud et al. for treating them less than philosophers :grin:

But I had a similar experience as described in the OP. Initially, I thought that philosophers were very specific types of people, but then I was surprised to learn that this term is used more loosely and broadly. It seems like it is used as another way to say "thinker", or a "thought leader".

When I was six years old, I was reading a book about mathematics and there was a chapter about philosophers. I asked my mum who philosophers were. She frowned and told me that philosophers were lazy people who didn’t want to do anything in their lives, and that I should never become a philosopher. So I became a software engineer. Thanks mum!

I was thinking about this when I was writing the comment. It's not about the system interpreting information, but it's about the people who design the system. What is life but a low whisper of limited relevance.

To be fair, the original comment was even more more arrogant than T Clark's response

So you base your philosophy on fairy tales rather than on solid fact? — Cornwell1

As a software engineer, I'm involved in building backend systems that collect information and then use it as a source of knowledge for decision making. As a system gets more complex, the amount of information grows not only in volume but also in variety.

When you have a system with hundreds of database tables and millions of rows, it becomes hard to understand all the data points and how they relate to each other. E.g. you have data collected about users, vendors, products, categories, brands, ratings, discounts, inventory, suppliers, open issues, shipments, recommendations, subscriptions, etc. The number of data points becomes too large to comprehend.

This raises a question about the practical ways to dealing with complexity and organising knowledge.

One of the best methodologies that I know is Domain-Driven Design (DDD). DDD suggests that in order for information to become useful, it needs to be put in a context (BoundedContext). A bounded context is usually centred around a specific problem, e.g. presenting product information to users; accepting payments; managing product inventory; fulfilling orders; shipping fulfilled orders to customers. Each context defines which data points are useful and which aren't, resulting in smaller, comprehensible sub-models.

As an example, the information that the sales department knows about products is very different from the information that the inventory department has. The concept of a product is the same, but the details are different. DDD advocates that in this scenario we have two BoundedContexts, so we create two sub-systems for managing each of the aspects while also connecting them by preserving the identities of products across them.

I think I explained this relatively poorly, but my main point is that information by itself is not useful until we put it in a context of a particular problem. This speaks to the pragmatic approach to knowledge described in the OP.

The Ukraine is a nation split right down the middle in terms of the views and cultural make up of the people — I like sushi

That was quite true in 2014. After that, Ukraine started Ukrainianizing the eastern half by promoting the Ukrainian culture and language. Many native Russian speakers started switching to Ukrainian, from social media to their everyday lives. Those who aren't comfortable with using Ukrainian full time still need to know it well enough to use in some situations. E.g. if you're on people-facing job and you've been asked to speak Ukrainian, you need to comply, or otherwise you'll be penalized. It's not a convenient process for Russian-speakers, but it makes sense in the current landscape of things. Probably should have happened much earlier.

Russia: Invades Ukraine and annexes Crimea in 2014.
Ukraine: There is a hostile country at our borders. We want to join NATO for protection.
Russia: Unacceptable! We don't want a hostile military alliance at our borders.
Also Russia: Increases hostility

This thread has not been about pragmatic behavior, it's about pragmatic approaches to knowledge — T Clark

Ah, so the purpose of the thread is to invite others to share pragmatic approaches to knowledge. Initially, I thought it was about the benefits of the pragmatic approach over other "non-pragmatic" approaches. My bad.

I don't disagree with everything said in this thread, but I feel that I start losing the track of what it means to be pragmatic vs not pragmatic. Could you give some examples of non-pragmatic behaviors or philosophies? It seems like it's the human nature to act pragmatically. Even the people who subscribe to seemingly nonsense philosophies have their reason to do so, and such people act pragmatically in their own ways.

I recently came across a book called Moral Uncertainty. It provides a framework for making ethical decisions in the face of uncertainty. Basically, the authors argue that one should treat empirical and normative uncertainty analogously. In making moral decisions one should maximise expected choiceworthiness.

The book contains an example of the leader of a major philanthropic organisation deciding to allocate $10 million of her resources. She is deciding between the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), which improves the quality of life of the extreme poor, and supporting cage-free egg campaigns. She makes the initial assessments of the value provided by each of the options, but she is also uncertain whether there is value to ensuring that chickens live in a cage-free environment.

After doing some math, the authors argue that instead of donating all the money to the AMF straight away, it is more choiceworthy to allocate up to $2.7 million to study animal ethics, if that helps her resolve the uncertainty about chickens. In other words, she should be willing to spend $2.7 million in order to find out how to spend the remaining $7.3 million.

The authors admit that the example is highly idealised—in reality the number would be smaller since complete certainty is impossible to reach—but they emphasise that dedicating resources into studying ethics is a good way for us to resolve uncertainty and to maximise the moral value of our decisions. Overall, I liked the ideas presented in the book, even though I skipped a lot of chapters because I found them boring.

In summary, the most moral thing that you can do is to invest your time into studying ethics and forming your own opinion about how much to donate and to which charity. Congratulations, you've already made the first step!

What goes on here is really different from what goes on in the design process. During design, sharing knowledge, or at least documenting it, is a fundamental requirement. It's not altruistic at all. — T Clark

Yes, it is a requirement, and some people treat it as an inconvenience: "I understand the problem, and I have a solution. Why should I be wasting my time on writing it down for the sake of bureaucracy?" Software engineers are free-spirited and they despise inefficient processes. A part of my job is to teach them to embrace this process, because I'm convinced that writing design docs benefits the author even more than the reader.

In software engineering, we have a practice of consolidating knowledge in Design Docs, also called RFCs (Requests For Comments). E.g. Google, Uber. Overall, it is similar to SCM. When someone needs to build a new feature or change an existing system, they will write the proposal in a design doc and assign relevant stakeholders for a review. This process has two main goals:

1. To help the author solidify their knowledge. Oftentimes when I start writing a design doc, I feel that I already understand the problem and the solution. But in the process of writing I discover significant gaps in my knowledge, which lead me to change the details of my solution.
2. To reach an alignment between stakeholders. A design doc needs to be approved by all stakeholders before the actual work can begin. Peer-reviewing helps evaluate the solution from a diverse set of perspectives.

A good design doc will clearly outline a problem, set a concrete goal, provide a solution, and evaluate the solution from various perspectives (how does it compares to alternatives, what are the performance and security implications, any assumptions made, main risks and unknowns).

I like this practice and actively promote it to others. Here are some of the problems that commonly occur:

• Sometimes it's hard to follow what the author is saying. The knowledge exists in the author's head, but it's difficult to reconstruct it by reading the document.
• Sometimes the author doesn't have a sufficient understanding of the problem. By reading their document I can tell that they didn't dive deep enough, or didn't put enough effort to clarify the details. I find this annoying because it places a burden on me to identify gaps and persuade the author to fill them.
• Design docs quickly run out of date. Software systems evolve at a rapid pace. When I look at older design docs, I need to keep in mind that the information that was relevant at the time of writing may no longer be accurate or relevant at the time of reading.
• Design docs are narrow-scoped. They are only concerned with the goal at hand, and they disregard any irrelevant information. They are effective tools to make progress, but they don't paint a clear picture of the current state of technology. That's why we maintain engineering documentation as a separate resource to provide a high-level overview of the system. Design docs are for deep problem solving, and engineering documentation is for high-level knowledge sharing.

Overall, my stance is that knowledge exists in our heads. We use processes such as SCM and design docs to solidify our own knowledge and to align our knowledge with the knowledge of others. The artefacts of the process, such as SCM and design docs, don't fully capture the knowledge that we have, but they help their readers to form their own knowledge. Obtaining knowledge and sharing it with others requires investing time and effort. A pragmatic person knows how to balance the time spent researching and the time spent doing.

Intuitively, we think that sharing knowledge is an altruistic act, because it takes away someone's time for the benefit of others. But I think oftentimes it is not the case. For example, this comment is an artefact of knowledge sharing. I expect that 90% of the value generated from this comment is for my personal gain, from organising my thoughts on this topic, and I can only hope that it will generate at least some value for others.

This is an interesting explanation. Where could I learn more about it? I’m curious to know what a periodic state without a temporal direction is, and how it allows clock time to exist.

• Problem of time: In quantum mechanics, time is a classical background parameter and the flow of time is universal and absolute. In general relativity time is one component of four-dimensional spacetime, and the flow of time changes depending on the curvature of spacetime and the spacetime trajectory of the observer. How can these two concepts of time be reconciled?
• Arrow of time (e.g. entropy's arrow of time): Why does time have a direction? Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, and time correlates with the universal (but not local) increase in entropy, from the past and to the future, according to the second law of thermodynamics? Why are CP violations observed in certain weak force decays, but not elsewhere? Are CP violations somehow a product of the second law of thermodynamics, or are they a separate arrow of time? Are there exceptions to the principle of causality? Is there a single possible past? Is the present moment physically distinct from the past and future, or is it merely an emergent property of consciousness? What links the quantum arrow of time to the thermodynamic arrow?

You articulated well your experience as a civil and environmental engineer and how it formed your view about knowledge.

It appears like you're describing knowledge in the context of a single individual. I would add that when it comes to collective problem solving, it's important to articulate thoughts promptly and succinctly. Knowing something well means being able to effectively explain it to others. It's also important to challenge others to help them solidify their own knowledge. I'll go ahead and challenge some of the ideas in the OP.

"Pragmatic Excellence" is one of the engineering values at the company where I work as a software engineer. I endorse pragmatism a lot. To me, being pragmatic means making decisions despite the lack of knowledge or sometimes even against what I know. Knowledge and pragmatism can conflict. This makes me wonder if it's safe to combine the terms "pragmatic" and "epistemology" together.

It's easy to arrive at a contradiction with "pragmatic epistemology". If we all adopt a pragmatic attitude towards knowledge, then we will stop pursuing the knowledge that is far removed from our everyday lives. However, if we look back at the past, we will see that our modern everyday world is grounded in the scientific projects that didn't offer any practical value at the time they were carried out.

A good example of this is the discovery of quantum physics in 1920s. Some of the smartest physicists in the world were devoted to probing the behaviour of matter on the smallest scales. At the time, you could critique their fascination with atoms and claim that nothing could be more useless to you than what they were doing in the laboratory. But their work led to the invention of the digital computer. It's hard to think of anything less transformative of our everyday world than that.

it would model the whole brain — T Clark

One thing that I know about these systems is that they model the brain mathematically rather than biologically. The biological inspiration is how neurons connect to each other, but the mathematical model is just a matrix A, where an element a_i,j is a real number representing the connection between the neuron i in one layer to the neuron j in the adjacent layer. What follows is a mathematical arrangement of neurons into layers that models the whole computation as series of matrix multiplications with a few other simple functions in-between, like the sigmoid function.

That's where the analogy with the brain ends, and we start 'arranging' neurons in the structures that are easy for the computer to work with. We end up with perfectly lined up grids of neurons that are more mechanical than biological. The brain has a complex structure with different parts performing different functions. To my knowledge, the existing artificial neural networks unable to replicate this biological complexity of the brain. This would require orders of magnitude more data points, and the calculations would be drastically slower because they wouldn't line up with the architectures of the modern electronic circuits.

I suspect that as we progress closer towards the possibility of simulating the human brain, we might hit a physical limit of how many computations we perform in a unit of time, rendering it practically impossible to replicate the inner working of the brain in a digital simulation. So instead of digital we would need to go analogous.

I can't tell if you say "mindless" because you want to leave a door open for consciousness to be something else. — T Clark

Yeah, I think I'm being intentionally vague to avoid trapping myself in wrong terminology. One point that I'm trying to make is that modern AIs don't seem to show the signs of a living creature's mind. I think we would know if we started sensing empathy towards them.

I'm also cautious about turning this in a discussion of .

Sorry, I think you confused this with something else. This is an example of the cutting edge technology in the field of deep learning that is actively being developed and improved by the most brilliant researchers. Of course anything complex can be explained in simple terms or broken down into the most primitive elements. This is the paradox of complexity.

Reality is, apart from anything else, painful. It is bloody, it is treacherous, it changes continually, and the pain that accompanies it is real. Whereas in the VR and AI worlds, there is no possibility of real pain, only simulation, and the difference is fundamental, but apparently not discernable to a great many people. — Wayfarer

That is a good point. In most of the modern video games it's not possible to lose. If you die, you just start from where you were a minute ago. But I know a few games in which people invest hundreds of hours and there is a real possibility to lose all progress in a matter of a moment. These games are not hugely popular, but the people who play them achieve unbelievable results. It is the possibility to lose everything that adds weight to the time that they spend in those games. Losing progress can be painful. The fear of death is the fear of losing years of progress.

It is interesting, but it would be all the more interesting if it weren't soaked in the whole Oedipus Complex of removing the artist (father) in substitution for the viewer (surrogate). It gets tiring... — kudos

That would indeed be interesting! Let's keep the artist.

There is nothing computed in the brain — Raymond

It appears like you're drawing a significant distinction between computers and the physical world. Programs don't fly and brains don't compute. I'm not aways following, but at least I can see a pattern.

Litterally every physical process has a potential analogue on the neuron network, which can run around autonomously or resonate with a physical process. — Raymond

How is it that every physical process has an analogue on the neuron network? Are you referring the neuron network of the brain, or the artificial neural network, or both?