Comment by sien
4 days ago
Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.
Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.
And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.
Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.
Rationalists have not read or understood David Hume.
You cannot work out what out to be from what is.
To want to be alive is irrational.
Nietzsche and the Existentialists understood that.
Arguably religions too.
> To want to be alive is irrational.
This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, because it probably is not.
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> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.
Errrf. That was poor writing on my part.
I meant use the AI to critique what you have written in response to reading the suggested authors.
Yes, a particularly smart critic would be better. But an LLM is easily available.
I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. But I can tell a bot what my background is, and it can make an explanation that is in the right level of complexity.
As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).
On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.