This is an uncharitable view of philosophy without much evidence to show for it, especially when it comes to the philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of computing. Not to mention, falsifiability being taken as the criterion for knowledge was itself (mathematics and logical axioms are not 'falsifiable') a claim produced by a philosopher, and one which some commentators name as circular in itself. You're using a particular philosophy to discount philosophy of science on the whole, which is ironic.

> This is an uncharitable view of philosophy without much evidence to show for it

Oh it has a lot of evidence. Just talk to any philosopher ever on any "meta" topic. Whether that be meta ethics, or meta epistemology, or meta whatever.

They start with a conclusion that they want, such as dual-ism, or philosophy souls, or all sorts of things, and then they wrap themselves in obfuscating circles finding a justification than can't be tested in any way outside their own circular pre-suppositions that have no connection to the real world.

> to discount philosophy of science on the whole

When the philosophers start making testable predictions, that I can measure, as opposed to making stuff up in their own self referential assumptions, I will start taking them seriously.

>They start with a conclusion that they want, such as dual-ism, or philosophy souls, or all sorts of things, and then they wrap themselves in obfuscating circles

This is false; if you believe in a proposition, it entirely makes sense for you to argue for it. Whether those arguments are of quality is another matter, but the simple fact of arguing for a position you already hold does not make bad work.

>When the philosophers start making testable predictions

Philosophy isn't in the business of making testable predictions, just as logic or history isn't in the business of making testable predictions. Why must an argument make a testable prediction for you to take it seriously? Does this argument we're having now result in a testable prediction? If it doesn't, why did you reply? Or if it does, doesn't that show there's more to rational argumentation than testable predictions?

You assume that philosophy is like religion. Not so. I'm moderately well read on metaethics and none of your statements ring true to me, except in the case of poorly argued or shoddy philosophy, which I'm more than happy to admit does exist.

> if you believe in a proposition, it entirely makes sense for you to argue for it

If someone believes in a magic soul, because philosophy, yeah they will make up whatever arguments they want to support it. Yes, that is my point. People started off with their conclusion, which is that they believe in magic, or they believe in some moral statement, and then they want to say that the universe proves them right, even though it has zero connection to the real world.

> Philosophy isn't in the business of making testable predictions

Exactly, they just want to make obfuscatory arguments that then allows them to make whatever claim that they want about anything.

And then when people try to actually test their claims, they then say that by definition their arguments can't be tested.

> You assume that philosophy is like religion.

It effectively is. Just make up a self referential, presumption that god exists, and it is basically the same as the philosophers who believe in dualism.

> just as logic or history isn't in the business of making testable predictions.

The big difference between mathmaticians, and philosophers, is that even though one could argue that some obscure mathematical theory that is never going to come up in the real world, is as equally "not real" as philosophy, is that mathematicians don't use their self referential axioms (in a situation which does not connect to the real world) to then say "And this is why the world should be switch to socialism" or "this is why you should be a vegan".

If I say that a math theory is not real because it has no connection to the real world, a mathmatician isn't going to say that they are, by definition, the experts on truth and morals, and therefore I should do what they say anyway.

If you want to say that philosophy helps a little bit with some reasoning skills, or as a way to think about things, sure whatever, fine.

But the problem is that philosophers, when they talk about meta-ethics or meta-truth, or whatever, then try to use their circular arguments to then claim that they are the experts on literally everything, because well "truth" and "ethics", by definition are everything.

I am going to say no on that. Just because you came up with some circular argument, that relates to truth, or ethics, or whatever, it does not mean that people have to listen to philosophers on basically anything.

>and then they want to say that the universe proves them right, even though it has zero connection to the real world.

That's a failure of the argument, not a failure of philosophy. Everything from ethics to epistemology has philosophers arguing against unjustified assumptions. One could say the whole of philosophy is picking out unjustified assumptions. It's perfectly fine to start with a conclusion, so long as you can also argue your way there. If you don't think the argument is valid, then say so. What do you think philosophers do all day, just agree with eachother on every statement?

>is that mathematicians don't use their self referential axioms (in a situation which does not connect to the real world)

Yes, they do. Plenty of abstract mathematical concepts have zero connection to anything in nature or in the physical world. Some philosophers of mathematics even argue that mathematics has no root in the physical world. Besides that, the position you're arguing for is known in philosophy as 'pragmatism' - so don't pretend it's not philosophy. You're assuming your own axioms here.

>then claim that they are the experts on literally everything, because well "truth" and "ethics", by definition are everything.

That's not true; moral philosophers confine themselves to the world of moral philosophy. Epistemologists confine themselves to the world of epistemology. They don't claim knowledge about, say, physics or biology.

>a mathmatician isn't going to say that they are, by definition, the experts on truth and morals, and therefore I should do what they say anyway.

The definition of morality is literally 'what you should do'. If you disagree with that, then talk to a philosopher or just post an argument somewhere. If you don't think morality exists, then congratulations, there are philosophers who argue that too!

I'm not impressed that your argument rests upon the simple fact of calling their arguments circular (i) without specifying why and which arguments are circular in particular (ii) and saying that there are no goals to be acheived by even talking about, say, epistemology.

Nobody said you "have to listen" to anyone. You don't have to listen to scientists, mathematicians, logicians, historians, or anyone, really. But if faced with an argument you can't counter it ought to be to your embarrassment that you refuse the conclusion without considering the argument itself. All of your arguments, all of them quite philosophical in themselves(!) could equally apply to any other discipline with 'circular' axioms, such as physics (the principle of universal uniformity; the reliance on fallible observation and testimony) or logic (the axiom of non-contradiction).

> Yes, they do.

You ignored the part of the statement where I then said (to then say "And this is why the world should be switch to socialism" or "this is why you should be a vegan".)

> Plenty of abstract mathematical concepts have zero connection to anything in nature or in the physical world.

Ok, and whether or not we say that this mathematical model is "real" or not, in some abstract sense, will not result in the mathematician telling me to be a vegan.

Basically, I can say "sure, your math model is real, in your own self defined axiom, but I can simply not care, or change any behavior, and thats fine".

> that your argument rests upon the simple fact of calling their arguments circular

So, the point of calling them circular, is that the philosophers I am referring to, aren't happy with me saying "Those are just axioms that you have. Sure, whatever, they are 'true' in a way that doesn't matter at all, outside of your own set of made up axioms, and if I don't have your axioms then I can simply not care, and there is nothing provable wrong with that".

The problematic philosophers I am talking about are the ones who are not just saying "here is a set of consistent axioms". Instead, the problamatic ones I am talking about are the ones who say "These axioms are true, because the universe said so, and therefore you should be a socialist/vegan/ancap/whatever", and they pretend like that is the same thing as using some chemistry knowledge, that is used to make rocketships.

> Nobody said you "have to listen" to anyone. You don't have to listen to scientists, mathematicians, ect

If I don't listen to scientists, or mathematicians, when trying to build a rocketship, then my rocketship might explode.

If I don't listen to a philosopher's argument about how a dualism magic soul exists, nothing happens. No rockets explode. I just make the philosopher upset that I am not becoming a vegan because they think the universe proves their axioms correct.

> could equally apply to any other discipline with 'circular' axioms, such as physics

Once again, thats fine! Because if we say that some set of untestable axioms isn't real, the physicist isn't going to get upset, and say that I am evil for not supporting whatever political argument they are making, because the universe proves them true. Its all just axioms. Mine are just as good as theirs. Philosophers have no authority on any of this.

> You're assuming your own axioms here.

Hey we've finally gotten there! Thats fine! Lets just say it is axioms all the way down, and nobody should listen to someone claiming that their axioms are proved to be true by the laws of the universe.

Thats the difference. I am not going to go around claiming that the universe proves my axioms. You have axioms. I have axioms. And philosophers have axioms. And just because someone is a philosopher, it does not mean that they can then wield that, and say that the universe proves their axioms true, and therefore thats why I have to support policy X or Y.

Just call it all axioms, and admit that philosophers aren't any better than anyone else's set of circular axioms, and call it a day!

Okay, say a philosopher makes an argument for why we should switch to socialism, or become vegans. These arguments would go something like:

"Socialism is good because it's a more equitable distribution of resources, which leads to greater happiness and a society with less poverty because xyz."

"Veganism is good because it reduces the harm done to animals and the harm done to humans working in the meat industry, who have far increased rates of PTSD compared to the general population."

These arguments will only convince you if (i) you think an equitable distribution of resources is better (ii) less poverty is better (iii) xyz is a convincing reason to think there would be less poverty (iv) harm to animals should be reduced (v) harm to humans should be reduced (vi) incidence of PTSD should be reduced.

These philosophers do not say there is some law of the universe which mandates that less poverty is better, or that PTSD is bad. The reasons why you should think those things, they would say, are second-order reasons. There may be some other paper arguing why PTSD in society is a net negative. That paper would ultimately read something like "icreased PTSD rates lead to increased rate of suicide/lower economic efficiency/harm to other humans". There is no single argument why harming other humans is wrong, only axioms that we would take as our priors, just as we take it that "A != !A". They just seem right, and you don't have to subscribe to them yourself.

Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted". It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions even given those axioms. Again, you don't have to share the axioms, but if you do, a logical argument can be produced from them, one which it would be to your embarrassment to ignore without any refutation, still assuming that you hold the axioms yourself. Again, you need not do so.

Similarly, the advice from a physicist about the heat tolerance of the hull of your rocket ship would need to balance both economic and other interests. If you don't care about going into debt, you can sey hell to the economic arguments, and use the best materials possible. If you don't even care about your ship launching, you can say hell to the physical arguments about tensile strength.

What I'm trying to convince you of is that philosophy is about as useful as any other field of inquiry in the sense that it attempts to argue from axioms most people hold already (therefore it is not a niche field) and it produces conclusions that such people can use in making choices day to day (therefore it is not a useless field). I think that no matter what particular axioms you hold, there is some philosophy which argues from those axioms out there somewhere. You yourself make philosophy. I'm not producing an argument from authority here.

Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct?

> Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted".

Ah, here is the disconnect, and where you would be wrong. What you are describing is called moral anti-realism.

And yes, if all a philosopher is doing, is saying "given a set of unjustified axioms, that we are assuming, this is what follows" then I have no problem with this line of thinking.

The problem that I have, is that the majority of philosophical thought these days, is for moral realism.

They don't just have axioms. Instead, they think the universe itself proves their axioms to be true, and if you disagree with their axiom, you are just as much of a science denier as if you questioned a different expert in a different field.

If only philosophers just admitted that they just had axioms like everyone else.

> It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions

Sure. As I stated in part of one of my posts, if we just want to say that philosophy is a useful way of thinking, then that's fine. Just don't say it is the same as the universe proving your axioms true.

> Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct?

It's called moral realism. Most philosophers are moral realists these days. They literally believe that their moral axioms are true, in a epistemological sense. (Veganism is just an example of one such moral statement that many make)

You can pick any famous moral realist, and that will be mostly the case for them.

I had a feeling you'd bring up moral realism, and you're somewhat correct; it's not a necessary feature of moral realism, however, and most philosophers arguing for moral realism have stronger arguments than "that's just the way it is", which usually appeal to our intuitions about other non-moral facts, such as "this chair exists" or "I have two hands". It's up to you whether those arguments are successful, but it doesn't do anyone favours to dismiss them out of hand as you are doing. If they were so patently ridiculous, I doubt many philosophers would believe them. If they make sense by relying on our intuitions about other facts of the universe, I can see why many philosophers believe them.

If you have a solid argument aganist moral realism, I'd like to hear it, even though I'm familiar with most of the arguments for moral anti-realism, and I generally sit on the anti-realist side of the fence these days. But it does yourself a disservice to say that all such arguments are circular and logically invalid. I quite like this argument from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral realism:

"In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do. But they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims."

> If they were so patently ridiculous, I doubt many philosophers would believe them.

> If you have a solid argument aganist moral realism

The key counter argument here, as to why the philosophy domain is so messed up, is because of motivated reasoning.

If you could get a PhD in the topic of "does God exist?" I can bet that most of the people with a "does God exist" PhD would say "yes" and they would come up with increasingly complicated and obfuscatory reasons for why that is the case.

Because why else would you go and get that degree in the first place? What, you would spend 4 years of your life, just to get to the answer of "no"?

And then they would say that they are the experts in the topic of God existing, therefore they are right.

A similar thing applies to philosophy. It's mostly motivated reasoning. People twist themselves into convoluted pretzels, all because they really want to believe that the universe proves their morals correct.

That's a much more tempting conclusion, than the boring one of "well, I guess everyone just has axioms, and that's that. We can't re-concile them. Oh well!".

So of course they get to the conclusion that morals exist. Because that conclusion means something. It means that you are right on the most tempting conclusion of truth and aught statements, and math/the universe makes it so!

You can wield that conclusion as a weapon. Of course people want that.

And even better, it can't be tested, in the real world, by definition! How convenient.

And then they say they are correct, because they are the self proclaimed experts on the topic, and if you cannot parse their ever more complicated, or ever more obfuscated arguments, well I guess you are a science denier like everyone else who disagrees with the "experts".

As in, it is literally almost the most perfect example of motivated reasoning. Untestable. Convoluted. Powerful. And by definition the basis for what people should do.

And philosophers just happened to come to the "convenient" conclusion.

The commenter I previously replied to has a PhD in those “other” fields, yet I haven’t seen a falsifiable definition of sentience made by them.

As a field of study, sentience has been a topic of philosophy more than ML. That’s why top-level comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt. Comparative quality of studies in different domains is a different question.

I did. Each one of these dimensions can be independently evaluated.

> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience), decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.

> comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt

C'mon, thats being disingenuous. People spent years poring on these topics, although we looked at it from the prism of computing. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that mentioning this detail is not about credential hopping: People on HN call you out for no reason for having an opinion. It has happened so many times that I don't risk commenting if required. Telling this extra information is just communicating we spent enough time on it to give somewhat informed discussion.

> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience), decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.

So, number 1, [citation needed]. I don't think that list is broadly accepted as a universally agreed definition of 'sentience'.

And number 2, your definition rests on further needing to define what it means for an entity to: think, rationalize, understand, decide, and know.

The premises of 'understanding where it is wrong' and 'understanding what it doesn't know' also assume some sense of 'self' that feels like it needs justification.

I think there's a very real sense in which computer scientists seem too willing to say 'we know this system isn't thinking' without having a rigorous understanding of what they mean by 'thinking'. Actually meaningfully engaging with the philosophy of consciousness on an academic level - citing scholarly works, taking seriously the fact that these things are not all obvious and agreed - feels like something that the AI field will have to start grappling with.

Can you describe how you test for independent thinking? What does independent mean anyways? A decision tree can rationalize its outcomes. Does it count towards sentience? Is there an academic source for this definition of sentience?

> Telling this extra information is just communicating we spent enough time on it to give somewhat informed discussion.

Doing so is appeal to authority. When there is a claim of authority, it's very natural for it to be questioned. And those questions are based on subjective perception of authority.

> Can you describe how you test for independent thinking?

Lets take a simple case: If I give a set of toy blocks to an infant - they could take a variety of tasks unprompted : building new shape, categorizing them based on color, putting them back in shelf, calling out their shapes. If you gave the same setup without any further apriori information, what would you expect the ML model or a robotic device embodying a learning algorithm would do? Precisely nothing unless a task is designated. In the current advancement of ML, this task would lead nowhere. We aren't close to building the independent thinking capabilities of a toddler . If we define a purpose, it can match or exceed expectations. That is the purpose of embodied VQA direction in current research.

> Doing so is appeal to authority. When there is a claim of authority, it's very natural for it to be questioned.

You're welcome to question any claims. This is an incentive to me & makes me happy. It shows someone is willing to constructively discuss what I've learned. Its a win-win, as I see it.

But I take mentioning the credential disclaimer as a mode of mental preservation. It doesn't feel nice sometimes to explain others with utmost sincerity to be called a "garden variety fraud" for no rhyme or reason whatsoever (It happened right in this HN post somewhere)

> If you gave the same setup without any further apriori information, what would you expect the ML model or a robotic device embodying a learning algorithm would do? Precisely nothing unless a task is designated.

Google deepdream liked to draw dogs.

But also, we don't really run most of these ML models in a way that gives them an opportunity to form their own thoughts.

A typical GPT-3 run consists of instantiating the model, forcing it to experience a particular input, reading its 'reaction' off a bunch of output neurons, then euthanizing it.

If you did the same sort of thing with a human mind - waking it from a coma, blasting a blipvert of information into the visual cortex, then read off the motor neuron states, before pulling the plug on it again, you also wouldn't likely see much sign of 'independent thinking'.

How could I "falsify" whether this definition is correct?