Is philosophy real? We sent our correspondent to find out.
I like philosophy. Not all of it is profound — there are two dozen treatises on the ontology of holes — but the field is accessible and can be eye-opening.
Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that's popular with techies is what I'd call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community. The system is a dependable source of unconscionable ethical stances, middling essays about AI, and little else.
To me, philosophy is more interesting when it exposes the limits of understanding. Today, let's tackle two other lighthearted questions: does anything matter and does anything exist?
The universe is your stage
The experience of free will is not up to serious debate. Argue what you like, but every waking hour, you seem to be in the driver seat.
At the same time, free will clashes with scientific materialism — the belief that there's nothing beyond the physical realm, and that this realm is governed by unchanging laws. In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. In a deterministic universe, we're just front-row spectators of a stage play set in motion at the beginning of time.
This conclusion is not only counterproductive, but also at odds with how we perceive ourselves. There appear to be just three ways to establish a philosophical truth: derive it from perceptual experience, take it from a dogmatic belief, or infinite regress. Perceptual experience is the only way to form a justifiable basis for statements about the real world. If we can't trust our perception, how can we know that the laws of physics are real?
This makes determinism a self-defeating idea; with it, scientific materialism is in trouble too. Quantum physics offers a probabilistic opening, but asserting free will from quantum events without evidence is a spiritual belief by another name. The most straightforward conclusion may be that the world, as we experience it, is irreducible to our conception of its physical substrate.
The lone solipsist
Even if you resolve free will, we can still ponder if our perception matches the "true" fabric of reality. On the extreme end sits solipsism. More recent variants include the brain in a vat, the simulation hypothesis, and the Boltzmann brain — a spontaneously formed disembodied mind with false memories.
A meta-linguistic cure tries to say concepts only have meaning within a closed reality, so "I'm a brain in a vat" is false inside the simulation. But a mad-scientist kidnapping case makes that feel unsatisfactory when there's 1:1 semantic correspondence. In the end, what proponents often want to know is whether there's someone up there watching — and if so, the simulation hypothesis is just nerds reinventing theology.