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guslI like to say I'm an epistemologist at heart because the philosophical questions that most motivate me come from the following belief:
* problems of language (ambiguity, disagreement about definitions, etc) can be solved through formalization, and this is a big part of my interests.
* problems of rationality: disagreements of fact should not be so robust ("you can't agree to disagree"): people tend to cling to their own beliefs (emotional attachments to beliefs), behaving as though they consider themselves better informed or more rational than others, although perhaps they only behave this way so as to be consistent with what they understand (people don't like unexplained facts).
* in disagreements about moral questions, either the utilities are not explicit or there are disagreements about fact (their probability estimates). People don't make a distinction values vs. beliefs. Btw, I take it as obvious that everyone should be morally utilitarian, though I know this is far from universal.
There are other kinds of questions which interest me, usually with a philosophical flavour, especially about normatizing reasoning: "which forms of inference are good?", priors and anthropic reasoning, but also questions about patterns in nature (Kolmogorov Complexity) what this has to do with priors. Meta-science.
The nature of information and information flow: how information flows through physical systems.
Many of my other interests have to do with logic: seeing that a reasoning system (e.g. a logic) is consistent, and how parallel forms of reasoning agree. I find it neat how there are multiple ways of solving physics problems, and I consider this evidence that the axiom systems we use are redundant (though a formal concept of "proof uniqueness" seems to be unclear, I tend to believe )
I enjoy refining my intuitions and subjects like AI and Linguistics (I consider these "tasty" subjects: refer to my post where I discuss ways in which research areas can be "interesting" (yet to come) ) because they involve introspection: how do I solve a certain problem? Probably for the same reasons, I like to be conscious of my cognitive processes. The unreflected life isn't worth living.
people shouldn't disagree as much as they do.
* problems of language (ambiguity, disagreement about definitions, etc) can be solved through formalization, and this is a big part of my interests.
* problems of rationality: disagreements of fact should not be so robust ("you can't agree to disagree"): people tend to cling to their own beliefs (emotional attachments to beliefs), behaving as though they consider themselves better informed or more rational than others, although perhaps they only behave this way so as to be consistent with what they understand (people don't like unexplained facts).
* in disagreements about moral questions, either the utilities are not explicit or there are disagreements about fact (their probability estimates). People don't make a distinction values vs. beliefs. Btw, I take it as obvious that everyone should be morally utilitarian, though I know this is far from universal.
There are other kinds of questions which interest me, usually with a philosophical flavour, especially about normatizing reasoning: "which forms of inference are good?", priors and anthropic reasoning, but also questions about patterns in nature (Kolmogorov Complexity) what this has to do with priors. Meta-science.
The nature of information and information flow: how information flows through physical systems.
Many of my other interests have to do with logic: seeing that a reasoning system (e.g. a logic) is consistent, and how parallel forms of reasoning agree. I find it neat how there are multiple ways of solving physics problems, and I consider this evidence that the axiom systems we use are redundant (though a formal concept of "proof uniqueness" seems to be unclear, I tend to believe )
I enjoy refining my intuitions and subjects like AI and Linguistics (I consider these "tasty" subjects: refer to my post where I discuss ways in which research areas can be "interesting" (yet to come) ) because they involve introspection: how do I solve a certain problem? Probably for the same reasons, I like to be conscious of my cognitive processes. The unreflected life isn't worth living.
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Value-Pluralism
Date: 2004-08-13 04:18 pm (UTC)It's a lot more complicated than that, of course... but the theory, which I think seems Evolutionary-Psychology-friendly (my own criteria for whether I think something is plausible) leads to the conclusion that some values and beliefs won't converge no matter how much analytical reasoning takes place, because equally valid values may be mutually incommensurable.