Is philosophy still relevant?

[Hipmonlee]

It would be very difficult to do science while rejecting any a priori knowledge. I dont know any scientists who feel that mathematics does not benefit society for instance.

I criticise philosophy a lot, but I do so with the knowledge that there are definitely good parts to philosophy.

You have metaphysics, for instance, which is total rubbish. But you also have times where a proper examination of semantics can really clarify things. I just wish these things were given a better name.

Because if we did rename it, I'm fairly sure it would be seen as a pretty esoteric field, so much so that to call it a field by itself might not even be appropriate. Philosophy isnt quite as bad as some people, including myself sometimes, make out, but it still is a field with major delusions of grandeur.

 

[capefeather]

Philosophy, the understanding of logical principals, and the intellectual spirit to apply them to your life and actions is absolutely useful in this day and age. In a time of prosperity, we have room to think, we have the resources to do amazing things, and the problem comes in making a decision. How can we structure a society to maximize the progress towards the goals of it's constituents? How do our current goals mesh into goals of the society, and how can we determine these goals? I don't think it's useless to think about changing the status quo or think about ideas in a vacuum because the act of reasoning these things out creates a society which is culturally more able to handle problems, make quick decisions, and act on it's desires, even if it never ends up deviating far from the way it is now.

I actually agree with this general sentiment. I consider philosophy a very broad practice that practically everybody does in practice. Even the process of converting a mathematical model into a explanation of the phenomenon it's modelling could be considered an exercise in philosophy. I consider this an aspect of philosophy that is relevant and always will be.

The problem happens when people try to make philosophy into an ivory tower. Either you're rigorous or you're wrong. I agree with myzozoa that rigour is very important, but having a rigorous framework doesn't make you right. It just means you're staking everything on a specific foundation of principles. It could also simply mean that the subject matter has been discussed for a very long time, which is the case for philosophy of religion, for example. I just think that too many philosophical frameworks sell themselves solely on internal consistency.

My other problem is when people worship philosophers of the past as the end-all-be-all of all human thought. To address Soul Fly's posts on this: Newton is revered as a great scientist of his time. Many consider him the greatest scientist-of-his-time of all time. However, by today's standards he's not an authority on, well, anything. His view of the universe is merely a stepping stone, either to engineering applications or as preparation for the more modern theories, which are more accurate but more difficult to learn. Contrast this with the attitudes of many "philosophy fans" (as billymills put it) toward philosophers of the past. They're treated as if they've already achieved the pinnacle of what they're talking about. That simply isn't healthy.

the notion of thought having to be somehow "productive" is entirely a STEM notion. the act of thought is an exercise in and of itself and imo deserves to be studied even if it doesn't lead to some arbitrarily-defined "scientific progress".

But my standard isn't "scientific progress". My standard is applicability. Discussion of undetectable dragons in garages is necessarily not applicable to anything. If it could be applied, then the dragon would be detectable through the application. Similarly, discussion of abstract societies that more closely resemble cave dwellers than civilizations is not applicable to a civilization. It just reflects a lack of recognition that we already tried the "natural state" for the vast majority of human history, and it wasn't pretty. Finally, discussion of concepts that we trick ourselves into believing are well-defined when they're not is not applicable to anything. All such discussion does is to trap people in thought-terminating cliches.

I just "called out" three very real approaches to philosophy advanced by very real people whom really are generally considered philosophers.

I agree that thinking about deep stuff and clarifying language are important endeavours and I kind of thought I provided enough evidence on this forum that I at least read up on philosophy sometimes. I have a problem when people merely believe that they're talking about something SUPER DEEP when they're just regurgitating arguments that have, on some occasions, been rendered silly and nonsensical.

As an example:

They address different questions, but too many people wrap themselves up in pitting them as opposing forces because it's so much easier to ignore morals and ethics by assaulting the rationality of the person proposing said morals/ethics rather than wrestling with the moral/ethical implications themselves. On the flipside, it's easier to call people Godless heathens than it is to process and adapt to new information about the way the world functions. The former impulse is much more prevalent in today's society.

[...]

The unmoved mover / first cause is a better philosophical basis for the existence of a God than the alternative view that nothingness gave rise to substance and, subsequent to that already mighty stretch, chaos gave rise to order - especially since all observed systems break down over time rather than become more resilient. I don't have enough faith to believe the laws of the universe as we understand them just decided one day to reverse themselves and trend towards order for a while.

It seems that by "how" and "why" you're trying to distinguish questions about the universe from questions about morality and ethics. Yet there's no reason for the two to be distinct. Aspects of human biology and psychology inform most if not all of human morality. Some people don't like that answer because it boils morality down to a matter of preference, but so what? Are people so unwilling to think of morality like that that they'd rather just declare that there must be an objective moral agent out there? (Side note: I've cleared up for myself what most people mean by "objective" and "subjective" since I posted on the subject.) To be frank, it often is the case that the teachings of a religion and/or religious denomination conflict with known facts. In such situations, who's really the one ignoring moral and ethical implications?

As for the first cause: I assume you mean the cosmological argument, which starts with the premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause. There are so many things wrong with this argument. I've seen a few different approaches to refuting it, including the distinction between creation ex nihilo and creation ex materia. But I think my favourite refutation is from Sean Carroll, who pretty much describes how the first premise is not even false because the language used is outdated and meaningless in the context of our modern understanding of the universe. The cosmological argument amounts to little more than an abuse of language, and the incredulity of the view that "nothingness gave rise to substance" (whatever that means) is no better. This kind of thing is a textbook example of what I've been talking about in this post. And you even take it one step further by misusing the second law of thermodynamics.

 

[ssbbm]

Question 1: How do you "learn" philosophy? I can't find any online courses, and although it would be nice to read the classics, I don't know how much it would really help me, seeing as a) I understand better with a survey of the field b) the books are too long to feasibly read and c) I wouldn't gain an understanding of the historical events that prompted such thoughts.

Question(s) 2: (which connects to the thread more): What do you gain out of "learning" philosophy? Do you gain any skills which you can apply outside of the field of academic philosophy? Is it mostly knowledge of the history of philosophy and past philosophical views that is gained? Does philosophy allow you to ask more interesting questions? Does philosophy allow you to answer interesting questions? What tools does philosophy provide? How does a philosopher respond to outside stimuli (as compared...)? What can a philosopher do that a non-philosopher can't?

 

[askaninjask]

(The best way to learn philosophy is to read novels inspired by works of it.)

Philosophy I'm pretty sure nobody is arguing is useful "to humanity". Philosophy used to be useful! The entire fields of math and science used to be contained under philosophy under the labels of "mathematical philosophy" and "natural philosophy" or something similar. The reason philosophy is useless today is that all of the usable parts of philosophy were taken away and turned into their own fields.

But I'm unconvinced that it's useless for a person to study philosophy for themselves. People don't have to change the world all the time with their studies, we should be satisfied if they've changed themselves, which philosophy is really good at. This is why there are so many "philosophy fans" - these are people who have changed their own lives for the better in their view through philosophy, and want more of that. Why are we judging?

 

[ssbbm]

If philosophy helped individual people (since I assume it shouldn't make people "worse", whatever that may be), why should philosophy not help humanity as a hole, since presumably better individuals create a better society? There are a few ideas I can think of - one is that individuals might benefit in a way that is either neutral or harmful to humanity as a whole, but none of the ideas are particularly convincing, since the majority of them end up hurting individuals in the end, which is not what philosophy should accomplish (or else it would be worse than useless).

 

[yond]

Believe it or not I think Deck Knight answered this best. You can't use science to answer philosophical questions of the "why". Philosophy isn't about concrete solutions to questions like "What makes the sky blue" nor can science tell you what makes something good or evil or what virtue is.

 

[Blazade]

I don't really get why the distinction between science and philosophy is perceived as so large. Really, it should be about applying rigor and thought to your problems. Science does answer the question of why, and philosophy can be practical. The only difference is that scientists have more information and accept/approximate first principles while philosophers start from scratch. Sure this gives us a pretty different depiction of the fields, but at their core I think they're quite similar in scope, goal, and method, enough so that members of one field shouldn't be shunning the other.

As a scientist, why accept first principles without thinking about why we're comfortable with them first?

AS a philosopher, why debate what assumptions we should accept if you don't know the possible scientific/mathematical effect of those assumptions?

 

[mirza]

Who are some good modern day philosophers I can watch on youtube or read their lectures somewhere? I know nothing about philosophy and the only alive philosopher I know of is Chomsky. I'm not really interested in the 'why' but more the 'how' of stuff if that makes any sense.

 

[Myzozoa]

Either you're rigorous or you're wrong. I agree with myzozoa that rigour is very important, but having a rigorous framework doesn't make you right. It just means you're staking everything on a specific foundation of principles. It could also simply mean that the subject matter has been discussed for a very long time, which is the case for philosophy of religion, for example. I just think that too many philosophical frameworks sell themselves solely on internal consistency.

Actually, it's not that you are rigorous or you're wrong (and I never said anything about frameworks or rigor or internal consistency actually), it's that you must be 'rigorous' otherwise you'd have no idea what the methods you used actually amounted to in terms of a result they produce. How can you understand what a result means unless you also understand the method by which you arrived at it? It's the difference between believing 'the sky IS blue' and knowing 'the sky APPEARS blue to my eyes because {insert stuff about light and eyes, etc}'.

Some methods have a foundational place in disciplinary frameworks: for example the standard foundation of methods common in 'the History discipline' (like ppl that write history and shit) is inquiry into primary sources (sources produced by people who lived during the time of inquiry). In science a foundational method is inquiry through empirical observation ('experimentation'). And yeah I know all this shit is actually way more nuanced than I'm making it out to be, but the point is that there is no granted true knowledge that just appears to us and then we know it to be true, the reason we think things are true is because of 'justification,' which comes from methods and frameworks as well. These things involve theorizing, or 'modeling work' as jorgen said.


As for contemporary philosophers in the 'canon' (mirza): Judith Butler and Frederick Jameson. They aren't on youtube tho.

also to compare progress in philosophy to progress in science would be to oversimplify. Scientific progress requires more extensive material conditions than philosophy, this is why science 'as we know it' didn't take off until a certain point in history when the conditions made it possible (industrialization, mechanization, miniaturization, better lenscrafting techniques, etc, etc. notice that mathematics made much 'progress' even in the absence of these things, and I argue that philosophy did as well). Not that philosophy doesn't require anything material (philosophers have to eat), it just doesn't require anywhere near as much. If you want to know why we still talk about Aristotle's ethics and not his physics, all I have for an answer is: read them both and make up your own mind. Progress is really arbitrary anyway (imo).

 

[capefeather]

Maybe I need to clarify that my "ivory tower" complaint was about specific patterns of argument I sometimes see from some people who either are working philosophers or have studied a lot of philosophy. For example, you have people who get into arguments about the definitions of a word, even when otherwise everybody has already agreed on a definition, or when it's not clear that everybody is familiar with the "dictionary definition". Another example is how people try to defend philosophical positions that have been forced to mutate beyond recognition to stay remotely plausible. Both cases are generally followed by a sort of smug declaration of the opponent's comparative intellectual incompetence.

The mistake being made when people do this is that they've spent so much effort trying to show that [some version of] their position is logically consistent, when the foundations have been faulty all along. Blazade is wrong in saying that philosophers start from scratch. Philosophers can't start from scratch any more than anybody else can. To start from scratch is to end with scratch. It just seems to me that some philosophical positions are based on pretending to have started from scratch, while smuggling in arbitrary assumptions and unfounded assertions. These positions should have died long ago but are still kicking around because people don't want to let go of spooky shortcuts to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The only purpose for such philosophical models is to justify their own existence.

Obviously there are branches of philosophy that do more than try to justify their own existence. They have a greater purpose that drives them to evolve and thus continue to be relevant to us. Definitions are important, but even more important are the motivations behind the definitions. This is how, like I said in my OP, philosophy has been tremendously helpful at times.

Also, I'm not saying that we should never talk about ideas from the past. I'm simply saying that people from the past shouldn't be worshipped as some sort of divine gurus who can never be surpassed and whose authority should never be questioned. I'm also making the observation that we, in the 21st century, necessarily have a different perspective when studying, say, Aristotle from the perspective of Aristotle's contemporaries, simply by way of having more ideas at our disposal. Zeno's paradoxes, which were originally meant to argue that motion is an illusion, can still be applied today to argue that you can make anything into an infinite process.

 

[Blazade]

The mistake being made when people do this is that they've spent so much effort trying to show that [some version of] their position is logically consistent, when the foundations have been faulty all along. Blazade is wrong in saying that philosophers start from scratch. Philosophers can't start from scratch any more than anybody else can. To start from scratch is to end with scratch. It just seems to me that some philosophical positions are based on pretending to have started from scratch, while smuggling in arbitrary assumptions and unfounded assertions. These positions should have died long ago but are still kicking around because people don't want to let go of spooky shortcuts to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The only purpose for such philosophical models is to justify their own existence.

I probably should have explained more of what I meant when I said that philosophers start from scratch. My background, while mostly mathematical, also dips into philosophy and philosophy of mathematics in particular. Sure you start out from scratch, but then you bring in an assumption, and from those assumptions you draw conclusions assuming your logic is sound. Poor philosophy, as you said, tries to sneak in the assumptions or give you reasons for taking them as truths. But really, the whole exercise of putting axioms in a vacuum and seeing what comes out can be very interesting useful in a lot of ways, again assuming that you have sufficiently tight rigor. You get confidence that the p --> q you found doesn't depend on anything else you could assume for instance, and you could discover that some of the assumptions you thought you needed for a (by your definition) satisfactory conclusion are unnecessary. You could see what follows fundamentally from a certain intuition you have and see if it creates a contradiction either fundamentally or with another assumption you like. A lot of this exercise is important to think about, not just in mathematics, but in other fields as well. The most concrete and useful truths we can draw from philosophy aren't the "p is true" claims, but the truly well argued "p --> q" ones.

 

[Chiki]

So I came across a juvenile, fallacy-ridden article today that nonetheless got me thinking.

A fallacy is a common mistake in an argument due to poor reasoning. The argument has to actually not be sound, i.e. it must be based on false premises or on invalid reasoning for there to be a fallacy. I don't see any mistakes in the reasoning of the article.

Philosophy is definitely wildly irrelevant to the modern world.

Comments like these are dumb. This is also a form of philosophy, so the very statement undermines itself.

Philosophy is really an activity in which one tackles the big questions of life: what is the meaning of life? Does God exist? Do values exist? How should we rule? etc. When considering this broad definition of philosophy, it's something we do all the time. For example, when Republicans and Democrats disagree, it's based on major philosophical and value differences. Republicans don't value the poor as much as the Democrats do, and they often disagree on the best way to tax people. These are major questions in value theory and political philosophy.

Philosophers of the past 50 years are responsible for creating whole subfields in sciences like linguistics (called formal semantics, see Richard Montague) and neuroscience (David Chalmers is one of the philosophers responsible for alerting us about what really is the hardest problem in science, the problem of sensation). John Rawls's work in political philosophy was so important that he was given the National Humanities Award by Bill Clinton. Chomsky is a great philosopher in addition to being the father of modern linguistics. Around a hundred years ago, Frege was the first to formalize logic, and as a result, he's considered the grandfather of modern day computers.

Unfortunately most people aren't aware of these contributions by philosophers.

It would be very difficult to do science while rejecting any a priori knowledge.

Try impossible. You need to know, for example, that the external world exists, there is no evil demon trying to deceive you, etc.


It's thanks to philosophy that we have ways of dealing with this serious problem, which would make scientific endeavors pointless. Some philosophers think we should take a common sense approach, i.e. that there's no reason to be skeptic about anything. For example, philosophers in the past believed everything was made of water, which seems to defy common sense. Another approach is the contextualist approach, is that we can be skeptics in a philosophical context, but that there's no reason to be skeptical in a scientific context. We can just take it for granted that there is an external world, and so on.

You have metaphysics, for instance, which is total rubbish.

Maybe you should go ahead and google what metaphysics is before posting total rubbish like this. Metaphysics concerns the nature of things, and how things are really like. Metaphysics deals with extremely important practical questions: what is personal identity? What is free will? For example, let's say that I'm a product of my genes and the environment (which is true for everyone). How can I say that I have free will in any sense? Or, what if someone went to a war for 10 years as a private and came back to his parents as a general? Should his parents cherish him the same--is he the same person? All of these questions are relevant to real life.

 

[billymills]

Comments like these are dumb. This is also a form of philosophy, so the very statement undermines itself.

Maybe that just makes the statement all the more accurate.

Maybe you should go ahead and google what metaphysics is before posting total rubbish like this. Metaphysics concerns the nature of things, and how things are really like. Metaphysics deals with extremely important practical questions: what is personal identity? What is free will? For example, let's say that I'm a product of my genes and the environment (which is true for everyone). How can I say that I have free will in any sense? Or, what if someone went to a war for 10 years as a private and came back to his parents as a general? Should his parents cherish him the same--is he the same person? All of these questions are relevant to real life.

None of those questions are of any consequence. They might be useful in justifying other questions which in turn produce practical applications (such as producing politically correct surveys, or determining a grade in an introductory philosophy course), but the most apt response to each is 'who cares.'

Of specific interest is

Or, what if someone went to a war for 10 years as a private and came back to his parents as a general? Should his parents cherish him the same--is he the same person?

How could this be relevant to real life in any sense.

 

[Chiki]

Maybe that just makes the statement all the more accurate.

The claim you're making here doesn't make sense. It's vague and you haven't bothered explaining it at all.

None of those questions are of any consequence. They might be useful in justifying other questions which in turn produce practical applications (such as producing politically correct surveys, or determining a grade in an introductory philosophy course), but the most apt response to each is 'who cares.'

How could this be relevant to real life in any sense.

You should at least take some time to think and try to understand before posting. What if personal identity wasn't something that remained over time? For example, why should you bother saving money for your retirement if you're not the same person as the person that occupies your elderly body? Why should you love your wife's elderly self if they're not the same person? Why should you love your children if they're not the same person? And so on. These all have major practical implications. Maybe you should divorce your wife and find another one. Another example is, let's say Hitler escaped to Argentina and got captured 30 years later. Should we hold him morally accountable? Is he the same person as he was 30 years ago? These situations are things that happen all the time in real life. Read the Stanford encyclopedia entry on personal identity and ethics for a more thorough discussion.

What if free will didn't exist? Why should you send people to jail, since no one is responsible for their actions? Why should you get angry at your kid for breaking your 3DS XL if no one can be held responsible for any action? This would have major consequences on how we live--we'd stop sending people to jail and maybe send them to a better "correction facility" as a result. We'd stop grounding our kids and focus on educating them. Derk Pereboom discusses this at length; if there is no such thing as free will, then there's no point in punishing criminals for "justice" since they aren't morally responsible for their actions.

As we can see, metaphysics has obvious and major practical consequences in everyday life. Most people just are ignorant of this fact.

 

[Hipmonlee]

I stand by my comments, I dont think your questions have any relevance to anything much.

For example, why should you bother saving money for your retirement if you're not the same person as the person that occupies your elderly body?

Why would same-personness be relevant? Save if you want to, dont save if you dont.

Whatever you decide when you decide about whether or not your elderly body is you doesnt actually affect the world that you live in. It just affects the language that we use to describe the world. IE you are the same person when you get old, but some philosopher might decide that we need to invent a new way of describing that. The words that you use to explain decisions will be different, but not the decisions themselves.

And for the purposes of this argument free will definitely doesnt exist, any argument against that is an argument that free will refers to something other than what, I think, most people expect (in this context anyway). But we should definitely keep sending people to jail (probably not so many, but, free will has nothing to do with that either).

 

[Chiki]

I stand by my comments, I dont think your questions have any relevance to anything much.

Why would same-personness be relevant? Save if you want to, dont save if you dont.

Whatever you decide when you decide about whether or not your elderly body is you doesnt actually affect the world that you live in. It just affects the language that we use to describe the world. IE you are the same person when you get old, but some philosopher might decide that we need to invent a new way of describing that. The words that you use to explain decisions will be different, but not the decisions themselves.

And for the purposes of this argument free will definitely doesnt exist, any argument against that is an argument that free will refers to something other than what, I think, most people expect (in this context anyway). But we should definitely keep sending people to jail (probably not so many, but, free will has nothing to do with that either).

When you save money for your retirement, you think "will I be around when I'm older" (when you use I, that's what it means to be personally identical with your older self, so it's already relevant) and not "will the person occupying this body be around and want the money I saved up for myself?" These aren't just different words; you really aren't the same person anymore. If you knew in 30 years, you wouldn't be the same person as you are now, then why save up money? I'm not saving up money for an elderly stranger. I'm saving up money for myself. So it's not just different words.

Lol how is it not relevant? I'll explain this as simply as I can. One reason we have prisons is because:

A second approach focuses on issuing punishment to, or obtaining retribution from, those who have committed serious crimes.

One reason is retribution because people are morally responsible. But if there is no free will, then it seems unlikely that moral responsibility exists. So how can we punish people for actions they're not morally responsible for? That's nonsense.

So what we can do is focus on making rehabilitation centers instead of contemporary prisons and treat people a lot better.

 

[Crux]

Because the only thing that actually matters is a person's experience of the world? People perceive that they are the same person who continues to exist over a period of time and people perceive that they, and others, have free will. It really doesn't matter if those things are false perceptions or not because people will always continue to draw meaning from them, and people draw important meaning from false perceptions all the time.

 

[Blazade]

One reason is retribution because people are morally responsible. But if there is no free will, then it seems unlikely that moral responsibility exists. So how can we punish people for actions they're not morally responsible for? That's nonsense.

So what we can do is focus on making rehabilitation centers instead of contemporary prisons and treat people a lot better.

People are deterministic. Complicated, but deterministic. Why then, do we have morals? What separates us from other machines? Complexity and rationality.

Is a gun responsible for killing people when it technically had no "control" over it's actions, it's fate was predictable, and the conditions were such that it would kill someone? Yes. Why then, do we not imprison the gun? Because it doesn't make any goddamn sense. We can destroy the gun, but not reason with it. The beauty of a moral system is that in a society of rational agents it serves not only to correct behavior and rebuild society through explicit or implict justice, but also to give a deterministic society a better environment in which fewer undesirable acts take place. In this sense, morality isn't the hammer of justice falling from outside the situation,, but a product of everyone's desire to mutually benefit each other.

Whether or not the justice system needs to be reformed is separate from this motivation. If we need to make rehabilitation centers it's not because people aren't responsible for anything (which they are).

In any case, I'd say philosophy's relevance shines through pretty well here. I'd find it difficult to call anyone moral if they hadn't thought about where their morals came from. And whether or not you are the "same person" in the decision making sense about investing money is important to think about at least in the sense of do you value your needs now, or your potential needs later. Even if it's simple, the beauty of formalism is in making a structure that lets you efficiently make decisions even when you only have yourself to draw on.

 

[Chiki]

Because the only thing that actually matters is a person's experience of the world? People perceive that they are the same person who continues to exist over a period of time and people perceive that they, and others, have free will. It really doesn't matter if those things are false perceptions or not because people will always continue to draw meaning from them, and people draw important meaning from false perceptions all the time.

This is akin to saying it's okay to live under an illusion. But I don't think many people would be pleased about that at all.

People are deterministic. Complicated, but deterministic. Why then, do we have morals? What separates us from other machines? Complexity and rationality.

Is a gun responsible for killing people when it technically had no "control" over it's actions, it's fate was predictable, and the conditions were such that it would kill someone? Yes. Why then, do we not imprison the gun? Because it doesn't make any goddamn sense. We can destroy the gun, but not reason with it. The beauty of a moral system is that in a society of rational agents it serves not only to correct behavior and rebuild society through explicit or implict justice, but also to give a deterministic society a better environment in which fewer undesirable acts take place. In this sense, morality isn't the hammer of justice falling from outside the situation,, but a product of everyone's desire to mutually benefit each other.

Whether or not the justice system needs to be reformed is separate from this motivation. If we need to make rehabilitation centers it's not because people aren't responsible for anything (which they are).

I really can't understand what you're trying to say. I couldn't understand your previous post about axioms, either. You seem to have a very confusing writing style.

 

[Blazade]

In the first post, I mostly agree that trying to do philosophy for the sake of a shortcut to a theory of everything from nothing (or something like that) is impossible and consequently, useless. I was clarifying to capefeather that what I meant by starting from scratch is figuring out what theorems logically follow from certain assumptions, and that the knowledge of these relations is useful in itself.

In the second, I talk about why morality and responsibility under determinism make sense, and to a lesser extent why thinking about this is useful.

I'm not intentionally confusing, sorry.

 

[Chiki]

In the first post, I mostly agree that trying to do philosophy for the sake of a shortcut to a theory of everything from nothing (or something like that) is impossible and consequently, useless. I was clarifying to capefeather that what I meant by starting from scratch is figuring out what theorems logically follow from certain assumptions, and that the knowledge of these relations is useful in itself.

In the second, I talk about why morality and responsibility under determinism make sense, and to a lesser extent why thinking about this is useful.

I'm not intentionally confusing, sorry.

Ok, so they do make sense, and I actually agree that they do, though for different reasons. But remember I'm not trying to debate on what free will actually is. We could assume, for the sake of argument, that they don't make sense. That would show how philosophy could be useful, right? My goal here is to show how philosophy could be useful if philosophers came up with certain conclusions about free will and personal identity.

 

[Blazade]

Ok, so they do make sense, and I actually agree that they do, though for different reasons. But remember I'm not trying to debate on what free will actually is. We could assume, for the sake of argument, that they don't make sense. That would show how philosophy could be useful, right? My goal here is to show how philosophy could be useful if philosophers came up with certain conclusions about free will and personal identity.

I don't think the usefulness of philosophy is in other people figuring out "free will" and telling people what it is, for instance, but in the independent thought of every agent to understand the question and produce a logical answer (even if they study the works of others). This creates a more self aware and tight moral system.

 

[Demoness]

When you save money for your retirement, you think "will I be around when I'm older" (when you use I, that's what it means to be personally identical with your older self, so it's already relevant) and not "will the person occupying this body be around and want the money I saved up for myself?" These aren't just different words; you really aren't the same person anymore. If you knew in 30 years, you wouldn't be the same person as you are now, then why save up money? I'm not saving up money for an elderly stranger. I'm saving up money for myself. So it's not just different words.

If you decide when you reach retirement that you don't actually want all the money that you saved up, you can easily donate it and other people can put it to use. Even then, if your reasons for saving money early on end up not being relevant or appealing to you when reach retirement, you will have other hobbies and past times that you will want to pursue, and if these require money to do, where will you be getting the money to do them?

This is akin to saying it's okay to live under an illusion. But I don't think many people would be pleased about that at all.

If said illusion allows people to enjoy their experiences living and lets them think that they do have choices in life and become better people in general, then what is the problem? If having free will and believing that I am in essence the same person when I grow older is living under and illusion, then I am fine to live under this illusion because it helps me become who I am, and I don't see many negatives to it, if any. If I am shown these negatives, and are convinced that living under said illusion is hindering me significantly, then I will reject it. However, as of now, I will go through life believing in free will and still being the same person in essence because I believe these things to be true.

 

[Chiki]

I don't think the usefulness of philosophy is in other people figuring out "free will" and telling people what it is, for instance, but in the independent thought of every agent to understand the question and produce a logical answer (even if they study the works of others). This creates a more self aware and tight moral system.

I'm not sure what your distinction between free will and "independent thought" is. They sound like the same thing to me.

If you decide when you reach retirement that you don't actually want all the money that you saved up, you can easily donate it and other people can put it to use.

There's two problems with this. The first is that this is the job of philosophy anyway, since this is an ethical question. Sure seems useful!

The second problem is that most people are very selfish and don't want to just give away their retirement money. They want to keep it for themselves. But if there is no future "I" then what's the point?

If said illusion allows people to enjoy their experiences living and lets them think that they do have choices in life and become better people in general, then what is the problem?

Most people don't agree with your argument. Simulated realities are not preferable to everyday reality, by virtue of being real. There seems to be something intrinsically valuable about truth.

 

[Hipmonlee]

These aren't just different words; you really aren't the same person anymore.

But whatever conclusion you come to regarding whether or not you are the same person doesnt affect whether or not you actually are the same person.

Firstly, if the question truly is metaphysical, then we cant answer it any better than "I dont know if we are the same person", so metaphysics remains bullshit. If we can observe something that defines our same-personness then the question is no longer metaphysical so it doesnt really affect my point about the bullshitness of metaphysics.

The second point here is to do with this:

When you save money for your retirement, you think "will I be around when I'm older" (when you use I, that's what it means to be personally identical with your older self, so it's already relevant) and not "will the person occupying this body be around and want the money I saved up for myself?"

You are viewing this problem from two separate perspectives.

From common usage it is clear that when a person says "I" they are not just referring to themselves at the exact moment they pronounce the word (which would still be an infinite number of themselves). In this thread you yourself have said "I couldn't understand your previous post about axioms, either" referring to yourself in the past tense. It is clear that in common usage the words people use to refer to themselves also refer to past and future versions of themselves.

When someone thinks "will I be around when I'm older" they are clearly intentionally referring to past and future versions of themselves.

So on the one hand you have that perspective of "I" meaning all times of yourself, and another perspective where it only refers to you in the instant. Yourself in the instant really has no relevance to the question of saving for your retirement. Like, lets say we decide that future us isnt the same person as present us. So we decide there is no point saving for our retirement, so we might as well buy a car. Except that we dont get the car until the future, so there is no point in doing that either, we can watch youtube videos of cars instead. Except that youtube isnt already open and showing us car videos, so opening youtube is pointless as well. So we end up not even moving, cause its comfortable. And even if it wasnt comfortable, moving is only going to relieve the comfort for future versions of us so we dont bother doing that either. We sit in a chair uncomfortable and hungry swearing at all those previous dickhead versions of ourselves for not getting up and getting a sandwich.

The "I" that only exists in the moment is not affected by any actions that that "I" chooses to take, its already too late. Decisions we make at a given time only affect that interpretation of ourselves that includes all future versions of ourself. Whether or not we are the same person in the future is irrelevant to our actions.

Whether we should love older versions of people we loved when they were younger is a question for psychology.

Ignoring free will argument because free will doesnt exist. Draw whatever conclusions you please.