ideas about the nature of philosophy
Looking at Bayesian-filter-busting spam email, I had an idea. Train a genetic algorithm to make Markov chains. Train the chain on Project Gutenberg's philosophical texts. Train a spam filter on the same texts. Then evolve philosophical texts, evaluating them by keeping the ones that the filter catches.
JS Mill, Headmap and cybermanifestos as corpus mashup sources
http://robmyers.org/weblog/2004/04/24/generative-philosophy
It was the work of a moment to knock together some code that would read in all of the newspaper articles that we’d tagged as being about a particular subject, run them through a Beautiful Soup-based parser to pull out the article text, and feed that into NLTK, then to dump the results into a Wordpress blog
http://www.gilesthomas.com/?p=221
So what would happen if we dropped all philosophical methods that were developed when we had a Cartesian3 view of the mind and of reason, and instead invented philosophy anew given what we now know4 about the physical processes that produce human reasoning?
What emerges is a philosophy close to the bone. A philosophical perspective based on our empirical understanding of the embodiment of mind is a philosophy in the flesh, a philosophy that takes account of what we most basically are and can be.
https://www.readability.com/articles/b5fl7iyv
I said, a few naturalistic philosophers are doing some useful work38. But the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower even in naturalistic philosophy than it is in, say, behavioral economics or cognitive neuroscience or artificial intelligence or statistics. Why? Here are some hypotheses, based on my thousands of hours in the literature:
https://www.readability.com/articles/58g3ugpe
Philosophers aren't convinced that brain scans can demolish free will so easily. Some have questioned the neuroscientists' results and interpretations, arguing that the researchers have not quite grasped the concept that they say they are debunking. Many more don't engage with scientists at all. "Neuroscientists and philosophers talk past each other," says Walter Glannon, a philosopher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has interests in neuroscience, ethics and free will.
https://www.readability.com/articles/3ggvelhk
The "meeting grounds" of statistical science and philosophy of science are or should be connected by a two-way street: while general philosophical questions about evidence and inference bear on statistical questions (about methods to use, and how to interpret them), statistical methods bear on philosophical problems about inference and knowledge.
http://www.rmm-journal.de/htdocs/st01.html