
What professional philosophers believe – Survey results - shawndumas
http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
======
adbge
There's quite a bit of further discussion (including explanations of a number
of the questions) scattered across a couple different LessWrong threads.

Explanations of many of the questions:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_p...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/)

What do professional philosophers believe, and why?
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professiona...](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professional_philosophers_believe_and_why/)

Here's a list of links to more discussions:
<http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420> I haven't actually gone through
these, though.

You might also want to check out:

Survey of eating habits among philosophers:
[http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...](http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-
eating-ethics-a-discussion-of-the-poll-results.html)

Survey of beliefs among economists:
[http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-
economists...](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-
agree.html)

~~~
Jacquass12321
_Survey of eating habits among
philosophers:[http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...](http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e..).
_

I assumed they all starved because one guy never passed the fork.

~~~
lurkinggrue
It's well know that most philosophers were heavy drinkers, I mean... Immanuel
Kant was a real pissant, Who was very rarely stable.

------
patdennis
Here's one of my favorites. Glad to see the pros are evenly split, because
this one really toasts my brain too.

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%)
Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

~~~
Wintamute
I lean towards a sort of death. But perhaps we're all dying and reanimating in
between each Planck time instant anyway, in which case we shouldn't worry
about it too much :)

~~~
goldfeld
That quite defines how I think about it. The current "me" is as different from
the me within a second from now as from a theoretical me at the other end of a
teleportation device that delivers me there within a second. The three selves
are all distinct from each other and in fact are as distinct (and as close) to
each other as from any other human being, with the caveat that the 'me's a
second from now inherit all the memories and physical state from the current
me, whereas a different person does not.

But in terms of selves, of consciousness, they're all isolated phenonema. I
think consciousness is merely an illusion, we think we have continuity because
we inherit the memories and thought processes from the self from the moment
before, but all that exists is a moment of awareness (the "now"), which is
analogous to a clock of a computer processor.

~~~
Zikes
Depending on granularity, your comment was written by a number of people
approaching infinity?

~~~
goldfeld
Yes. And I really do think it approaches infinity, or else our wetware has a
limited clocking speed and that would define a single atomic moment of
awareness (seems more likely since we're highly advanced computers, but
computers nonetheless.) Even as I was writing the comment several clocks might
have been spent not on it, but picking up ambient sound and other stimulae. To
the extent that I'm half conscious to these other things, I was actually fully
conscious to them though for only a few number of clocks, whereas things on
which I seem to be fully conscious are demanding the majority of my
(multi)processor clocks. There's the case for whether we can truly multitask--
are we multi-core? We definitely are as to the many functions done
subconsciously, but what about the conscious regions of the brain? But to
simplify the thought experiment, we can simply think that we can only really
spend any single moment of awareness on a single atomic thing, and like a
computer we juggle attention between various things so fast as to make it seem
we're doing them all concurrently (like the various applications
simultaneously running on a computer.)

The upside, of course, is that my philosophy frees me up for gultfree
teletransportation. Bring it on!

------
knowtheory
What should hackers expect regarding the subjectivity/objectivity of aesthetic
value? Should we have expected that particular choice to have broken down into
thirds? What does it mean that it did break down into thirds?

Even with a minor in philosophy & a degree in linguistics which involved a
good deal of philosophies of language and mind, i'm not sure what to make of
the results of this survey. Anyone have a better perspective on what the deal
is here?

~~~
bcoates
That was one of the most surprising results for me, I wasn't aware that
objective aesthetics was even taken seriously.

------
spenrose
Time to reread my favorite pg essay: <http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html>

~~~
snowwrestler
It's a great essay but this passage highlights to me the sillyness of
philosophy:

> I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that
> lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no
> central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could
> conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could
> conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different
> bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being
> two people.

Take a living person and excise part of their brain, and they will continue to
live. There have been accidents, injuries, and surgeries that have proven
that. I don't know about fully half, but I would not be surprised if it
worked.

BUT - take half a brain and transplant it into a different body? There is zero
evidence today that that is even possible.

One might say that such technology just hasn't been invented yet. True. But
maybe it will never be invented; and thus it's really science fiction
disguised as philosophy. I think quite a lot of philosophy ends up being
disguised fiction--science or otherwise.

------
maxisnow
It's great to see numbers but the reality is to get exact answers from any
professional Philosopher you would need to let them rewrite the question every
time. Working with pro and academic Philosophers on symposiums taught me that
even the folks in the same micro sub-field with each other have these chasms
of interpretation that led to huge difference in expression.

------
purephase
A lot to dive into there, but the God results immediately jump out at me.

~~~
jgesture
People who tend to be interested in philosophy and are theists probably tend
to go into religion rather than philosophy.

~~~
knowtheory
That's one hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis would be to suggest that the
more educated one becomes in philosophy the less that religion makes sense,
and the clearer it becomes that there is no evidence for theism.

(Note, I'm not advocating for either of these hypotheses, but correlation is
not causation.)

~~~
sramsay
I seriously doubt that. Most "professional philosophers" these days are doing
analytical philosophy, and it's been at least 500 years since a non-crazy
person has been persuaded one way or the other about God by studying logic.

I suppose Georg Cantor might be an exception to this.

~~~
manicbovine
Gödel had an unpublished ontological "proof" [1] that's fairly simple to
understand. It hinges on two things: 1.) accepting a logical system in which
possibly necessary truths are necessary; 2.) accepting his argument that it's
_possible_ for god to exist.

But I guess you said non-crazy.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6dels_ontological_proof>

------
PaulHoule
it would be interesting to have social games that could extract answers for
these questions from ordinary people who don't know what the terms mean

~~~
Evbn
Why "social"?

~~~
jfb
MVP. Mobile and disruptive come later.

------
gizzlon

        Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
         
        Accept or lean toward: [..]
        Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible 	217 / 931 (23.3%)
    

Uhm.. ? :)

What does "metaphysically" mean in this context?

~~~
jonhmchan
Phil major here.

Imagine a being that acted exactly like a human, it spoke, laughed, etc. -
everything that you'd imagine a human being to do. However, it does not
actually feel or think.

For example, if you were to prick one of these "zombies," they would say
"ouch," recoil, perhaps berate you, but the zombie does not actually feel pain
- it's a purely mechanical process.

Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of being, properties, identity, etc.
What one means by whether such zombies are metaphysically possible is really
an answer to the question: are such zombies really any different than how we
are?

For more: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie>

~~~
loupeabody
Thanks for the explanation! Now I'm way interested in reading more about these
zombies.

~~~
jonhmchan
For those of you interested in learning more, look up these terms (I studied
philosophy related to Complex Systems, and zombies were a central question in
my thesis):

John Searle's Chinese Room, Turing Test, physicalism, Conway's Game of Life

------
rvkennedy
In the question, "communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism", 40%
said "Other".

I'd really like to know if any one idea dominates here - for example, if 38%
of philosophers espouse totalitarianism, that's worth getting into.

~~~
jerf
If you flick the setting at the top to "fine" you get a deeper breakdown. I
won't paste it here as it would be quite tedious to format it here.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Tl;dr: they're distributed among "unclear", "more than one", "intermediate
view" and so on.

------
sramsay
I take "other" to mean "Well, it's complicated."

I'm most surprised to see deontology so high (nearly as high as
consequentialism) under normative ethics.

~~~
saraid216
"other" at coarse granularity, or "other" at fine granularity?

------
skeltoac
Surveys of philosophers: normative or informative?

~~~
jules
Neither.

------
chime
I was surprised to see so many leaning towards the switch in the Trolley
problem. I still haven't made my mind on that.

~~~
tocomment
I think it's interesting that self driving cars will have to decide this
themselves someday. What do you think we'll have them do?

~~~
protomyth
Humans fail(1) quite a bit on this problem when it comes to animals. One case
I remember was a driver who avoided a dog on the highway which resulted in the
driver and 3 teenage girls dying.

I am not sure what a self-driving car is going to do.

1) "fail" as in get the car load of people killed.

------
deadairspace
I'm surprised how popular compatibilism is. It seems like a complete cop-out
to me.

------
tocomment
By the way, what happens if you do a coin flip for newcomb's paradox? The
entity can't predict that.

------
jamessun
The contrarian in me can't help but think that the least popular answer is the
"right" one :-)

~~~
loboman
I get you are joking but... That's just as bad as thinking that the most
popular answer is the right one. The best you can do is to decide which one is
best by analyzing the contents, not the % values.

~~~
jamessun
Agreed.

------
gadders
I was hoping to see absolute or relative moral values, but couldn't find it on
there.

~~~
memla
No, but there is a question concerning moral realism. Since moral relativism
is a type of moral anti-realism which is entertained by 27.7% of respondents,
it follows that less than 27.7% philosophers are relativists.

~~~
glomph
Many formulations of relativism are actually pretty unpopular when compared
anti-realism.

------
platz
I'm surprised scientific realism fared as well as it did.

------
ExpiredLink
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Sounds like nonsense to me.

 _Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur_.

------
RivieraKid
If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the
answer for most philosophical problems from that.

~~~
PaulHoule
The success of science in explaining everything else, however, means that
practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon.

~~~
RivieraKid
What do you mean by "practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon"?

