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Nathan Ormond's avatar

Great Post. To go in a direction that you weren't going in, as an autistic person, my personal opinion is that philosophy is very autistic, but I don't think it should simply be viewed as a green-pasture special interest.

In my opinion, mainstream academic philosophy, the problems it motivates and how it socialises and inducts curious autistic innocents into being confused about what ordinary words mean and trapped in a tangled knot of pseudo-problems actually develops a kind of disorder that requires therapy to cure! And I sincerely mean this, the only hope in hell people typically have are 1-1 interventions pressing on cognitive dissonance and bringing peoples attention away from the way they've been socialised to use words in philosophical contexts back to paying attention to the ordinary.

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Max Slavin's avatar

Great stuff! A few points.

It's unclear how philosophy can reliably recognize when a theory becomes overly complex or ad hoc. Unlike empirical sciences, which test theories against observable predictions, or math, which relies on formal proofs, philosophy often depends on intuitions and thought experiments. These are tools with no clear external standard of validation.

There are of course internal criteria like coherence, explanatory scope, and parsimony. One could even argue that intuitions (e.g. moral intuitions) are a kind of data. But these standards are soft, often contested, and highly susceptible to bias or a kind of philosophizing that makes an external observer think that what he’s reading is unrealistic gibberish. Without empirical tools, theory creep sometimes becomes unstoppable.

The AlphaFold2 also analogy doesn't work here. Its predictions are rigorously checked against empirical protein structures. Philosophy lacks that kind of feedback loop. Without it, how do we distinguish genuine insight from elegant but unconstrained speculation?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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