Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures".
As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately, the philosophy course seemed deeply rooted in classical theories like dualism (which I think of as a rationalization for religious dogma), ignoring any and all modern advances in neuroscience. The final straw was the lecture unit on "artificial minds". There was a lot of uninformed speculation about AI, which really disappointed me. The professor (and textbooks) completely ignored beautiful advances like Godel's theorem, which would make a great foundation for philosophizing about axiomatic "minds". I tried to speak up about what AI really is, even tried bringing Russell/Norvig into class, but I don't know if it was the professor or the students who were more resistant to facts clogging up the debate.
Anyway, I have nothing against philosophers, and I believe that they are an important part of the intellectual framework of academia. However, in inter-disciplinary cases like this, I really hope that they get people that can successfully straddle both sides of the divide. Stephen Hawking's quote in his new book comes to mind. I don't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines that a lot (not all, naturally) of philosophers have closed themselves off to science and thus denied themselves access to the greatest intellectual developments of the 20th century.
It's quite a shame that your philosophy of mind class didn't cover recent philosophical research where neuroscience and empirical psychology are taken seriously.
There is plenty of philosophical work that attempts to make sense of recent advances in brain science. A lot of it is centered around the 'hard problem of consciousness', or the question of why we have phenomenal experiences at all (and how these correlate to neural events). Although most serious proponents discard dualism, not all of them agree that phenomenal experiences can be reduced to physical phenomena (Dave Chalmers, Thomas Nagel).
To the scientifically biased the idea that physicalism isn't true is abhorrent, but contemporary philosophy, although not univocal, has serious arguments against it. If you find yourself dismissing this idea right off the bat out of scientific intuition I would urge you to read up a little bit on modern philosophy of mind.
Generally I agree with your critique of this approach to a subject, but I think philosophy is an exceptional case, more like a hybrid of mathematics and literature than something like physics.
If philosophy was taught the same way physics is, it would be utterly intractable.
Unlike physics, philosophy has little in the way of settled canon. There are precious few bits of established gained ground when it comes to the truly fundamental questions of a given area of philosophy.
At an entry level, the point of a proper philosophy education is to foster an appreciation for the big questions and for critical thinking.
From there, it is convenient to work historically as it provides both a natural progression of thinking on the topics as well as perfect training for how to find holes in arguments.
By begining with Socrates, the student is exposed to robust and relatively accessible arguments on most of the major topics in philosophy.
This helps students approach the questions earnestly.
Trying to begin with an examination of the current thinking on most philosophical topics would be almost impossibly divorced from that which a new entrant to philosophical thinking could grasp in a deep and rewarding way.
Instead, a good philosophy teacher can walk a student through a rewarding exploration of the major topics in philosophy across history, showing how the implausibilities of the past are far more robust than most think and how much of our present intuition is on far shakier ground than most think.
I don't quite see how you could practice critical thinking while not gaining any solid ground. Are philosophical truths to unattainable, so eternally receding? How do you know that your way of arguing has any benefits if you can't get closer to truth with it?
Solid ground was gained rapidly up until philosophy had sired all the major disciplines. What remains are the most ethereal and intractable problems, and while certain possibilities have been ruled out and others have gained popularity, they are not the sort of thing that regularly admits to being outright solidified.
Every high school chemistry textbook I've seen actually works this way! It's horrible. The chapter starts with Dalton, works up through Rutherford and Bohr, and the last two or three I've seen ended there. Each section is presented as fact, and the kids are quizzed to make sure they know the material, before tearing it all down and teaching them a new bogus theory in the next section. Ugh.
I was taught atomic theory chronologically starting with the plum pudding model, then rutherford's model, then Bohr's model and finally the quantum models.
At each stage, the focus was on:
* What observations led the scientists in question to propose the model? e.g. in Rutherford's case, there was an extensive discussion on the gold-foil experiment, the observations he saw, and the conclusions he drew from it (e.g. that a lot of mass must be packed into a tiny space).
* What properties follow from adopting them model? e.g. with Rutherford's model, the notion of an accelerating charged particle (electron) would mean that the electron would continuously lose energy until it crashes into the nucleus. obviously this isn't happening.
* Repeat the cycle: how did bohr's model attempt to overcome these problems.
We did the same with the theories on acids and bases: how Arrhenius' concept required the notion of liquid to be present, how Bronsted and Lowry formulated it more generally as proton donation and acceptance, and how Lewis formulated it in terms of electrons.
I like that at each step, we learned WHY these models were proposed and how they explained the phenomena seen until then. We learned WHAT the consequences of making a physical model are, and we learned WHAT new observations could not be accounted for. Then we learned about how concepts are generalized to account for more information.
In contrast, if I had just been shown a beautiful but complex model at the beginning, I'm not sure I would have learned as much or held as much interest. The difference is like seeing a very elegant proof to a problem vs seeing the different half-correct approaches culminating into a final solution. I feel that if the goal is to teach people how to think like scientists, show them the process not the final result.
I last took chemistry in 10th grade, and I too was exposed to the progressive chronology of atomic theory.
While today I would appreciate it for what you point out, at the time, those lessons were lost on me, and I was a thoughtful kid. I think if the pedagogy were more oriented around the progess of the scientific method, it would have been fantastic.
It seemed misguided, though, in the context of a chemistry chapter on the nature of atoms. Let's also not fail to acknowledge that a gifted teacher can make all the difference in how a given approach might be, and I imagine that the more complex, contextual picture that respects that our understanding is still evolving would be superior in the hands of a gifted teacher.
Unlike say, physics, there is a big shortage of over-arching theories in chemistry. The field (in my experience of it, at least; about 5 semesters' worth) is mostly a collection of ad-hoc rules, with many exceptions and special cases. So I think the historical approach is more or less necessary for teaching these fields.
It works the same way as when bootstrapping a computer, where you have to load a bunch of fake "operating systems" (e.g. BIOS, Grub, early stages of init daemon) before you can run the latest version of the "real" OS. And after that, you will still progress mostly by patches.
This simply obeys the inner logic of each discipline. Philosophy without regard to its history would be myopic, and hard science would be bogged down by historical details. This is not to say that the history of science is not worth learning, simply that it is not useful for science.
I'd argue that physics is being taught the way philosophy is. It's just that with physics, there's clear evidence that previous approaches fell short and there is no need to dwell on them for a long time. However, in introductory classes, you still go into the reasons that previous approaches were wrong. Why do we need to postulate such things as atoms? Knowing why advances were needed makes it much clearer why the current approach is right.
In philosophy, you need to go through all the motions to understand exactly where and why previous approaches fall short. You need to be able to reproduce the exact lines of reasoning, because you need them over and over again. Old paradigms are revisited over and over again. After thoroughly understanding why duality falls short, you discover that there are actually ways to save it. But you have to be very careful not to fall into one of the traps of reasoning that made you reject it previously. A thing like Platonism isn't dead, but any current Platonist has to be very refined in order to keep his philosophy credible.
I think there's a real difference between teaching wrong-but-very-useful things like Newtonian mechanics and teaching wrong-and-not-at-all-useful things like the four elements.
I also think it's unfair to characterize Newtonian mechanics as "wrong." Under the right circumstances - ones that apply to a lot of day-to-day scenarios - it accurately predicts what will happen. Not so much with the four elements. They, in fact, do not have any predictive power.
I found learning about things like caloric theory, and the ways it was dis-proven, in physics rather enlightening since it gives great insight into the evolution of scientific knowledge and the general workings of the scientific method.
Instead you learn the latest 'correct' answers, which you can then write on a test and receive a grade for.
I'm not disputing that modern physics is our best understanding of how the physical world works, but you do lose an important aspect of education by this style of pedagogy. When do you learn what made the best scientific minds what they were? Why should you have to reinvent their learning yourself if you want to be as great as them?
The way 'they' teach physics is just one way to learn it, not necessarily the best. Especially if your goals are not simply to get a degree.
My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.
Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences and other "hard" disciplines are frustrated by how useless their facts are in solving these debates.
As someone with degrees in both a hard science and philosophy I'd say that philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than other disciplines are to philosophy.
> My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.
That may not be as true as you think. Notice the high percentages of internalism, libertarianism, and other positions associated with dualism. (Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask flat out about dualism):
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 526 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 252 / 931 (27%)
Other 153 / 931 (16.4%)
Not sure how you can pick "other" from those options, but there you have it. (Physicalism implies non-dualism. Non-physicalism does not imply dualism.)
> Physicalism implies non-dualism. Non-physicalism does not imply dualism.
Since they didn't ask about dualism directly, nor, as far as I can tell, any position that logically entails dualism, obviously there is no deductive implication here.
I'm making a probabilistic point - non-physicalism is heavily represented (more than a quarter) among the group Samd specified, and thus there are pretty good odds that at least one academic philosopher espouses the specific non-physicalist theory of dualism.
Since you're the one who used it, I assumed you knew what it means. :)
I was confused, because (not having taken any philosophy classes since 1990) I didn't recognize the term as anything but political. I thought other people might similarly be confused if they weren't familiar with the philosophical use of "libertarian".
Good philosophical debates tend to be about things that are, at least currently, unprovable or unobservable. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences are frustrated by how ignorant many philosophers are that the things they're debating have been observed in repeatable experiments and are no longer suitable fodder for philosophical debate.
Have any examples? I'm curious which philosophical problems have been solved by science.
Edit: To be fair, I'll provide an example of what I mean. David Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" is about why we have qualitative experiences. You can explain all of our brain states in functional ways, like pain's function is to prevent damage, but that would still not answer the question of why pain hurts. I don't think science can answer that question, at least not in a way that is observable and testable.
For one simple example, I believe there are still serious incompatibilists/philosophical libertarians--even after experiments showing that physical stimulation of the brain and even transcranial magnetic stimulation can alter perceptions, actions, and even cognitive processes. Daniel Dennett is a great example of a philosopher of mind who takes cognitive neuroscience seriously, but I don't think he's in the majority.
How is that fundamentally different from someone observing 2500 years ago that drinking wine could affect the same processes?
That is the point many in this thread are trying to make. The essence of the question is usually more persistent than it first seems.
That the physical can influence or even determine the mental has been known for at least as long as 3000 years. Those particular experiments you reference don't add much to the philosophical discussion of libertarianism at all.
I'm sure there are still some out there, but I haven't run into any. Most philosophers I know are compatibalists. Though to be fair predictable is not the same thing as determined, and we mostly think that determinism is false.
However, I think the true philosophical problem of free will is deciding what exactly a "will" is and what it means to be "free". You've got to answer that question before you can decide whether free will is compatible or incompatible with determinism.
When I was in school, there were still some debate about ontology.
That doesn't mean there were serious papers about how much the soul weighs, etc., but rather that some were still puzzling over whether strict materialism is fully satisfying or not.
edit: I now see your comment about Chalmers below. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
This major is undoubtedly related to the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. The academics associated with it take a very technical perspective, so I think you'd be satisfied. I believe Nick Bostrom is the main guy behind the FHI.
(A google tech talk from someone at the FHI called "Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?" Yeah. They're pretty serious guys.)
EDIT: They also run lesswrong.com. I imagine that's enough to get most here reaching for the UCAS forms...
I'm not sure this actually is related to FHI. Certainly, don't sign up for it on that basis until you've checked with FHI to make sure you'd actually be working with them.
FYI, the Future of Humanity Institute does have an opening for a postdoc in computer science who wants to branch out into more philosophical/futuristic areas, i.e., they want an academic who already knows algorithms and wants to learn philosophy of mind and rigorous futurism.
Some great computer scientists and AI pioneers, for instance Terry Winograd, turned to philosophy to look for solutions to some untractable technical problems.
Some philosophers like Bertrand Russell initiated some of the deepest scientific questions. And it's still philosophy (in the figure of Karl Popper) that defined what makes science. Philosophy is the meta-science par excellence.
Apparently you had some bad luck, by discovering philosophy from a poor professor. I had the luck to discover philosophy through some deeply interesting professors, even though I could deeply disagree with them (my first professor of philosophy even was a priest, eeek). I never stopped studying philosophy ever since I was 16, and I probably never will.
I sympathise with your position that philosophy is a kind of meta-science, with the caveat that that is only one kind of philosophy. But Karl Popper did not define what science is. That's an ongoing question (and one to which I think there is no single answer.)
Philosophy of the Mind is much different from Artificial Intelligence. And it is also much different from Neuroscience.
Neuroscience asks 'How does the Brain work?'
(Based in biology and chemistry).
Artificial intelligence asks 'How do I simulate human intelligence?'
(Based in math, and computer science, complexity theory).
Philosophy of the mind asks a lot of messy questions that don't really fall into either of those buckets. The mind isn't the brain, and the mind isn't strictly human intelligence, so what is it?. What is consciousness? How is it that I have an idea of self? What are my perceptions? How do I model the world around me? What's up with free will?
It is as much about asking these questions and refining them into new questions, as it is about anything else, and most of these questions really can't be answered with scientific facts or mathematical algorithms.
From the aspect of learning philosophy in a historical context, you kind of have to, otherwise you are sort of doomed to repeat the mistakes of others who came before. In stark contrast to science, in philosophy, you are questioning the nature of reality. Hence you cannot really design experiments (unless you are G.E. Moore), to prove this or that philosophical property. Instead, you have to build on all of the other work that has come before you, and understand why the things that people thought were true, are untenable or not true.
(rather long unrelated tangent: A number of people, like pg, think this is kind of stupid. The other options, unfortunately, are chasing our tails, or simply saying that these questions are unanswerable. Sometimes, Wittgenstein is interpreted as saying that all philosophical questions are simply reduced to 'language games'.My interpretation is more that he is making a statement about the relationship between reality and language, we are using language do describe reality, but there are certain things which contain the reality which cannot be described with language, because language is a part of that reality. There is a very strong parallel between his work and Godels'.)
So no, philosophers do not ignore science. But a lot of the time, when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much. (Why use philosophy where you can use objective fact?)
Another example is that philosophy is very firmly ingrained in things like string theory or quantum mechanics. But the truth is, string theory and quantum mechanics boil down to equations which describe things that we have already observed. You still need a discipline in which you can speculate and say, 'Ok, but what does this mean about the nature of my reality? How does this effect me beyond being interesting math? What is the implication here?'
Do you mean the difference of hardware and actual content or something else?
and the mind isn't strictly human intelligence, so what is it?. What is consciousness? How is it that I have an idea of self? What are my perceptions? How do I model the world around me? What's up with free will?
Isn't that what neuroscience probably will answer at some time? For example, we might get an answer to these questions from the Blue Brain project.
And maybe AI also in a somewhat different way. For example, we might get the result that all kind of intelligence has some form of consciousness and we could even define it somehow because of the knowledge we get out of AI. I even think it is very likely that we will get an advanced knowledge of what intelligence is by advances in AI.
The mind is a concept, the brain is a physical thing.
It is very conceivable that things without brains could have minds. 'Strong' Artificial Intelligence is an example of this. Intelligent quasars would be another example. (Meat that thinks? Preposterous!)
It is also very conceivable that things without minds, could have brains. Does a dog have a mind? aardvark? chipmunk? toad? ant? They all have brains that function in basically the same way as ours do. Saying that the mind doesn't really exist is also an acceptable answer, but kind of an odd one from the perspective of someone experiencing it.
Point being: Neuroscience is primarily mechanical.
It explains human brains and monkey brains and dog brains equally well. It explains hwo they work. We primarily study human brains because we have a vested interest in understanding them. (Also we consider our own brains to be the best). We end up studying the mind in neuroscience, because it is one of the interesting (and complicated) phenomena of the human brain (as compared to an ant brain).
I could not agree more. I think that of course that smart philosophers do not ignore scientific advancements. Furthermore people are too reductive, sure mind = brain in a reductive sense in the same way that chemistry can be reduced to physics but you still have to learn all about what chemistry has to give you don't you? I'm a strict materialist but even I realize that you need a different language to talk about properties of the mind versus properties of the brain. We are only at the very beginning of the scientific road, philosophical questions always come back to bite you on the ass I say.
It's not that you are bad at articulating this stuff, it's just that it is very hard to articulate. You quoted Wittgenstein - he also said that philosophy is an activity, one where we strive to make our ideas clear - by at least trying to articulate your thoughts you are walking down this road so don't apologize!
"when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much"
I think this sums up quite well why philosophy is perceived the way it is. Once something becomes useful it turns into a new field, which explains why it may seem as if philosophy accomplished nothing.
Historically speaking, all (sans math? ~) western science stems from philosophy in its broadest sense.
In response to your comment and the (well articulated, btw) parent, the problem I have/had is in this part:
"when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much"
The "so much" part was what troubled me -- most of the philosophy of mind class was historical developments, etc., but occasionally it did step into the realm of science, while ignoring everything science had to offer. Perhaps I had an ill-informed professor, but when the parent says that philosophy of mind deals with "messy questions", that suggests that sometimes it can tread on the toes of fact, even if unintentionally. The inability to recognize when that was happening was what disappointed me.
I was a philosophy major and my take was always that "philosophy is the study of things science hasn't yet solved". Yes, it butts up to science and when you tread over the line that helps you either prove or disprove that part of the theory.
It is like a financial model for a startup. In the beginning you guess at what your revenue and expenses are. Then you learn some facts (my rent is $xxxx/mo and I currently have xxx paying customers). You adjust the model based on the new facts, but the rest is still your best guesswork.
I always imagined philosophy as the study of things beyond the realm of science. By saying that its the study of things science hasn't yet solved, you're saying that philosophy is speculation about things that science will possibly solve, but speculation without taking science to date into account, and without empiricism. That just sounds like bad science. Am I misunderstanding your point? In fact, your last three lines sound exactly like the scientific method + uninformed speculation. The difference seems to be that science insists on a way to invalidate your speculations, whereas philosophy does not.
I am not an arbiter of what philosophy is, but it is not bad science. There is no empirical step in philosophy at all. Science requires an empirical step.
You have to take science to date into account. If you do not, you will be proven wrong immediately. You will say 'I think the universe is composed entirely of jelly beans', and I will say 'y experiment disproves that'. If there is an empirical way to answer a question, you should use it. Empiricism works well because it is very convincing.
A lot of the time, you do not have an empirical way to answer your question, because the technology doesn't exist, or the terminology for the question that you want to ask doesn't exist, or you haven't yet adequately specified what the question is.
At its best, it should be the building of a rational, informed, theory about a conceivable hypothetical situation, and rational explorations of the implications of that hypothetical.
Historically, what we call "Science" was called "Natural Philosophy" and much of what we identify with the history of science was not a product of the scientific method. For example Galileo did not measure the velocity of falling bodies to prove that objects of different weights (and he did not say "mass") fall at the same speed.
Even more recently, the entire field of psychology grew directly out of philosophical speculation about mental states. Starting with Kant in the late 18th century and ending with James early in the 20th, the study of the mind became an accepted part of natural philosophy or science (having James on the faculty of Harvard certainly didn't hinder the acceptance of psychology as a science).
I don't think that's what is being proposed. Philosophy is not bad science. But you can't always know which questions to ask with science, especially in a new field.
One of the things which philosophy does (and has done) is to clarify which questions to ask, how to ask them, and so forth. Once the problem domain is clarified enough, science can step in and start being useful. Of course, there is no clear-cut border between the two (which can be seen historically in the development of physics, biology, etc.)
That's definitely not the only thing which philosophy does, but I think that's the idea being discussed here.
"Hasn't yet figured out how to tackle" is better than "hasn't yet solved." Philosophy figures out what kind of question to ask, which then spawns a field of science which starts methodically asking and answering them.
As someone with a degree in philosophy and mathematics but who has earned his bread & butter doing QA, coding, network and sys admin I feel that I have a lot of inside knowledge that I can bring to this debate.
I could fill an essay myself in response to Paul's post but I'll keep it brief so as not to bore anyone.
This: "Philosophy doesn't really have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various individual philosophers have said about different topics over the years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered."
The subject matter of philosophy is the world of abstract ideas. Some call them universals, they are to be contrasted with cold hard facts, stuff we can reason scientifically about. It is not that "few were sufficiently correct" but rather (as Kant for one pointed out) that metaphysical claims like the famous "Gods exists" or the "universe is infinite" can be asserted to be true while at the same time there opposite can be asserted to be true! "God does not exist". "The universe is finite". Now, does that make everyone wrong? No, of course not, a wiser person just digs deeper.
And this: "But did studying logic teach me the importance of thinking this way, or make me any better at it? I don't know."
The thing is, as I've come to realize (from thinking about it long and hard!) is that logic is not a part of philosophy. Yes they go hand-in-hand but logic is really a cross-disciplinary tool with applications in many disciplines, mathematics, computer science, philosophy and so on. Just because it has traditionally been very closely associated with philosophy can mislead us into thinking that logic is part of philosophy. And so to blame philosophy because learning logic didn't benefit you in the way you thought it would is a category error at the very least in my opinion.
I'll stop here but I have to say, I would love if Paul were a bit more humble and a bit less arrogant and realize that there's a reason philosophy is so difficult. It's not because it's all smoke and mirrors and sophistry - though there is some of that, and you need the mental tools to sort the wheat from the chaff. You know Richard Rorty has said that philosophy is merely a branch of literature! And he was one of the leading philosophical figures of the last century! Think about that for a moment...
I would argue that mathematics itself does not have a subject matter. It started with counting and geometry, then became applied to physics, and slowly developed applications to probability, then computing. It seems to me that if we can reason in a rigorous and general way about any subject, the study of that reasoning is a discipline within mathematics. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems to me to in fact have a subject matter, or rather many subjects. Philosophical conversations always center on something, be it the existence of abstract ideas or the foundation of moral choices. (If you think that having a multitude of subjects constitutes having no subject, then one might make the same charge that science has no subject since it investigates sounds as well as heat flow, as well as cancer...) What I think separates philosophy from other disciplines is not the kinds of subjects it investigates, but the kinds of answers to them that it seeks: completely precise, general, and unquestionably true.
From what I know of the audience here, I think a lot of people would be interested in reading a well-reasoned response to one of pg's essays. Even if it's long.
I double-majored in CS and Philosophy of Mind (this was in the late 1970's). I agree, the older philosophy of mind material is not too illuminating, but some of the newer work by people like Fodor and Dennett is more interesting (or so I seem to recall; it's been a while, heh). But towering above all these people, IMO, is Gregory Bateson, a name you probably won't find on the reading list at a university. Check out Mind and Nature.
I participated in high-level interdisciplinary courses in philosophy and science and philosophy and mathematics.
While I grant everything you've said, the lack of rigor cuts both ways. In my experience, many if not most who come from the non-philosophy discipline arrive with little to no respect for the philosophy half of the course. They enter with the popular conception of philosophy as something vague and contemplative.
What this leads to is that the non-philosophy participants get frustrated that the discussion seems to center on silly or archaic questions of metaphysics, as you have described regarding dualism. In truth, though, most of the archaic questions persist with more sophisticated questions and pushed farther down the rabbit hole.
Take dualism, for example. While dualism in the sense of the ancient and medieval philosophers has no supporters remaining, the ontological status of consciousness and intelligence is still a much-contested topic.
I want to emphasize, here, that I'm not talking about the causal status of various states of consciousness or that consciousness seems wholly dependent on physical processes and structures. These are trivial points and givens in a modern discussion of the topic.
The interesting question is not the basis or the mechanism of sentience but rather the phenomenon of the sentience itself. Even if a thought is entirely constituted by physical phenomena, it corresponds with a separate set of subjective phenomena which are not obviously physical -- our internal life and our awareness.
With no disrespect intended and with no pretense that my understanding of these problems is anything approaching complete, I've found that many who share your experience to not fully have grasped the essence of the given problem in question, often satisfied with an intuitive answer that, were they to more seriously delve into the matter, they might understand to have been powerfully undermined 2500 years earlier.
There's a reason that when most of the sciences spun out from under the label of philosophy, some matters of consequence and importance defied progressing toward that more solid ground.
I expect many would say that this is because the remaining questions are nonsensical. Despite my personal experience to the contrary, I understand this viewpoint. It is at least worth consideration, though, that the philosophical questions that remain won't submit to the scientific method; that's why they are philosophy. Many of the greatest minds in history struggled with these questions, for centuries, not because they were lacking in relevant facts but because they realized this special class of problem that seemed impossibly beyond any collection of future facts.
In studying philosophy, it's difficult but essential to guard against letting the absurdities of a given era's ignorance occlude the essential aspects of their arguments on questions that are still open. Usually those arguments prove to be quite relevant to the modern understanding with only minor tweaks to particulars.
*As an aside, please excuse me for placing all of this under your comment as I'm not trying to lecture you as much as present ideas in response to similar themes your anecdote evokes. I don't doubt that your experience is exactly as you said and that you understand the open problems even better than I do. Your writing, though, opened a more general line of thought that I wanted to express in reply to be seen by on-lookers rather than something aimed at you in particular.
Its ironic that duality was given as an example of how phillosophy is irrelevant to AI. Logic/Mathematics are both dichotomized ontologies of opposotes. Nothing could be more relevant.
How about oop which is modeled after plato's ontology of forms? Processes/Objects, this line of inquiry nor the language originated from cs.
That's really interesting and unfortunate you were unable to help move the conversation forward toward a more realistic understanding. I think it's probably a 'time and place' situation where you are in a class with a lot of different people intellectually and this kind of 'engineer think' can seem to distract from the heart of the conversation. Hard to say.
I think everything you are saying is actually more reason this is necessary, esp. right now as our understanding of machine learning and AI are beginning to yield some progress. And for some reason this reminds me of Krishnamurti and David Bohm conversing about the nature of consciousness - bringing together two worlds that typically are apart is really fascinating and ripe for new discovers of thought and understanding. All good things.
This seems pretty similar to the experiences of some of my colleagues at university who were doing a Physics with Philosophy cross-discipline course (I was studying computational physics). The philosophy professors seemed to have little to no understanding of even basic physics, yet were quite happy to theorise. You'd think they might have at least run their ideas by some physics professors (there were plenty of them in our dept. who were probably wacky enough to humour them) before doing lectures and seminars on them.
Of course, this was York ("only" in the top ~10 UK unis), not Oxford (top 2-3).
It is all a matter of where we stop asking questions. Mostly, good philosophers keep on pushing and end up with something ridiculously hard like Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness. But most of us refuse to recognize that this is even a problem: the brain produces it.
Just because we answer one of (what,when,why,how,where) does not mean the whole problem is solved.
There are places to discuss these issues intelligently and philosophically; lesswrong.com comes to mind. I agree it's a shame that the classroom debate isn't better, but undergrads are really at the beginning of their intellectual maturation, and many of them think of philosophy class not as a place to learn how to think about things but as an arena in which they must defend their own naive intuition.
(I also took a mind-body problem class as an undergrad, at Georgetown. It actually wasn't as bad as the one you describe, though nor was it perfect.)
> ... many of them think of philosophy class not as a place to learn how to think about things but as an arena in which they must defend their own naive intuition.
Isn't this why the Socratic method was invented? Rather than simply argue, Socrates asked questions and let his interlocutors draw their own conclusions.
True story: I nearly failed a philosophy of mind exam because I gave a one sentence reply that the answers that a question (on perception) sought were to be found in the discipline of cognitive science and not philosophy! A bit cheeky, but true I thought.
I only passed the exam because I aced the other question about artificial minds in which I knew all about Turing machines and other stuff backwards from my knowledge about computers that my fellow philosophy students didn't.
As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately, the philosophy course seemed deeply rooted in classical theories like dualism (which I think of as a rationalization for religious dogma), ignoring any and all modern advances in neuroscience. The final straw was the lecture unit on "artificial minds". There was a lot of uninformed speculation about AI, which really disappointed me. The professor (and textbooks) completely ignored beautiful advances like Godel's theorem, which would make a great foundation for philosophizing about axiomatic "minds". I tried to speak up about what AI really is, even tried bringing Russell/Norvig into class, but I don't know if it was the professor or the students who were more resistant to facts clogging up the debate.
Anyway, I have nothing against philosophers, and I believe that they are an important part of the intellectual framework of academia. However, in inter-disciplinary cases like this, I really hope that they get people that can successfully straddle both sides of the divide. Stephen Hawking's quote in his new book comes to mind. I don't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines that a lot (not all, naturally) of philosophers have closed themselves off to science and thus denied themselves access to the greatest intellectual developments of the 20th century.