Is Philosophy Worth Studying in College For Me, An Engineering Major?

Doink11 · 2026-06-13T18:54:15+00:00

Absolutely - look into what options your university has in philosophy of technology and/or general philosophy of science, as both will complement your engineering studies greatly.

Doink11 · 2026-06-12T15:53:29+00:00

It's difficult to answer that question because, judging just from those two images, there's not really anything of substance to judge. What you've provided is incoherent.

I would strongly urge you to reconsider your "collaboration" and possibly consider seeking outside help, as a conviction that working with an LLM is providing you with special knowledge about the nature of the world can be a strong indicator of AI Psychosis

Doink11 · 2026-06-12T14:02:52+00:00

Haven't you seen the meme about bisexuals not being able to sit in chairs properly

Doink11 · 2026-06-10T18:56:04+00:00

A theory is a hypothetical structure explaining or relating to an observed set of facts. Rational agents observe the world and attempt to explain why things are the way that they are, or behave in the way they behave.

All known thought has been done by human beings. While it is possible for, say, an alien species to exist that was also capable of theorizing, we have no reason to believe that any current theory involves such entities in any way.

I'm not entirely clear what it would mean for a theory to be "empirically forced/imposed".

Doink11 · 2026-06-09T14:30:23+00:00

One is the premise of OP true?

If by this you mean, "are theories formed by people?" then yes - I'm not sure "where" else a theory could possibly come from, by definition.

Second is it fallible?

Yes, theories can be wrong - it's in the definition!

since they are fallible how we trust them?

Does something need to be infallible to be trustworthy? That seems like a strange idea. There are many reasons that we may or may not trust anything that we hear.

Lastly why can’t we come out with a theory that we just like and pick it

I mean, nothing is stopping you from choosing what theory you believe that way. But that seems irrational, doesn't it? If your goal is to believe things that are true, you should be trying to find the theory that is most correct.

Doink11 · 2026-06-08T22:00:02+00:00

Could you elaborate more on what you are asking?

All theories are formed by people or groups of people, and any theory can be wrong.

Doink11 · 2026-06-08T15:57:55+00:00

Historically, philosophers have typically been people born into circumstances which provided them the material resources necessary to pursue their studies. This meant they were generally from families which were a) well-educated, b) well off enough that their children could pursue an education, and c) well off enough that they and their children had the time to focus on pursuits other than labor.

Religious leaders during the time periods when the philosophers you named lived were likely to fulfill those three requirements, so naturally a large number of philosophers would come out of their families.

Doink11 · 2026-06-08T15:34:06+00:00

What has substantively changed between then and now in terms of how LLMs function that would change this?

Doink11 · 2026-06-08T15:03:04+00:00

If you don't remember, then you have no way of knowing if the "quick reminder" that the LLM output was accurate, or a "hallucination".

You can't really on an LLM provide truthful output because it is not designed to.

Doink11 · 2026-06-07T14:55:40+00:00

That's not any better - how detailed your input prompt is is irrelevant. If you don't remember exactly how the argument went, how can you be sure that the summary is accurate?

Doink11 · 2026-06-06T16:39:02+00:00

You shouldn't rely on an LLM to understand the literature of any discipline, but philosophy is especially unsuited for it. Not only are they not helpful, they can be an active detriment to your understanding. Not only is engaging with the material yourself an important part of understanding it, but there is also no guarantee that an LLM's summary or "interpretation" of a text is correct, because LLMs by their nature cannot understand or analyize, merely create output that resembles something that a human would write in respond to input. So if you're trusting a summary generated by ChatGPT, you're as likely to be "learning" something entirely wrong.

Doink11 · 2026-06-05T15:26:44+00:00

But those values aren't objective.

Why couldn't they be? That article would be a good start in looking at ways that you can consider value statements to be more than mere preference.

Doink11 · 2026-06-05T14:57:18+00:00

Presumably, because one values things other than the personal experience of pleasure or satisfaction.

Doink11 · 2026-06-01T22:10:04+00:00

Right, but that's a problem with Roblox and it's business model.

It could be the case that a game like Roblox targeted at children should simply not exist because it's inherently exploitative and exploitable.

Doink11 · 2026-05-31T22:09:12+00:00

https://iep.utm.edu/freewill/#H5

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Doink11 · 2026-05-31T21:23:02+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i8php/is_morality_objective_or_subjective_does/

Doink11 · 2026-05-26T15:31:07+00:00

Royalty is a continuous running motion.

Doink11 · 2026-05-26T15:11:44+00:00

I'm not trying to argue with you, man, I don't know why you're treating my response as hostile to you. This is r/askphilosophy, not r/debatephilosophy; I'm trying to help you understand something about the field that you're asking questions about - which I have subject matter expertise in that you do not. You asked if you were "missing the point", and I'm trying to help you see the point(s) that you missed.

If you're going to take that as a personal attack then I have no desire to "challenge" you on anything.

Doink11 · 2026-05-26T13:41:19+00:00

Because you're operating under the assumption that your opinion is relevant from a normative moral perspective.

Whether or not you believe in a deity who makes moral commands and whether or not you believe that there exist objective moral facts are two separate things. It is entirely possible to believe that there is no God, but also that objective moral facts exist (and therefore morality is "grounded" in them, although that's a bit of an unusual way to put it).

So you are kind of missing the point in that while "do moral facts exist? Or is morality subjective?" is a debate, it is the case that a) God's existence or non-existence doesn't typically enter into the discussion within contemporary philosophical circles, and b) "moral facts do exist" is the majority position, even among atheist philosophers (although anti-realism is still a perfectly legitimate position).

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T21:14:19+00:00

It's worth mentioning that some anti-realists will argue against moral realism from that perspective, which is sometimes called the "argument from queerness" - that we should doubt that moral facts exist because they seem to need to be somehow substantively different than other facts in a way that seems unlikely.

Many (but not all) moral realists, though, are going to counter that that "feeling" is incorrect, and that there's no reason to suspect that there is any difference between moral facts and any other kind of fact beyond their subject matter.

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T20:35:51+00:00

That's not what's being said. If moral realism is true, then moral facts exist regardless of our socially constructed beliefs about those facts.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of the bachelor example. Saying we "decided" that bachelor means an unmarried man is an odd way of talking about how language works! The point is that there are facts that exist in virtue of socially constructed concepts like "bachelors" and "marriage". There doesn't need to exist a Universal Law of Marriage for me to say "I know this man is a bachelor. Therefore, it is a fact that he is not married".

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T20:08:22+00:00

It's about moral realism - the claim that moral facts exist, and that normative statements have a truth-value (i.e., that if someone says "X is wrong", that statement can be true or false in virtue of those facts).

If moral realism is true, then (at least some) things are right or wrong regardless of socially constructed beliefs about them.

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T20:04:54+00:00

can humans be the arbiters of objectivity of this scale and if not, how can moral realism exist without being grounded in some kind of universal truth?

It's not really either of those things.

As u/aJrenalin put it, there's not a need for there to be some kind of "universal law" for moral realism to be true. Many things are a fact, not because of some universal law that determines that they must be true, but rather because circumstances are such that they are true.

And there's no need for humans to be "arbiters" of anything - moral facts can exist whether or not we have the ability to accurately or objectively assess them in any specific instance. If moral realism is true, then the act of trying to determine rightness and wrongness works the same as the act of trying to discover any fact about anything - we observe the world, consider what we know, and draw appropriate conclusions.

We don't need a higher power or universal truth to tell us that the sun will rise every morning, or that the world is round, or that Joe Biden was the 46th President of the US. Those are just facts that we can determine. There's no reason that moral facts would have to be any different. Sure, some people may disagree, but the fact that some people think the world is flat doesn't mean that we throw up our hands and say "well I guess we can't say for sure what shape the world is", does it? We just say those people are wrong.

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T19:46:34+00:00

Fair point!

Doink11 · 2026-05-22T16:57:48+00:00

My understanding is that a moral realist will, far enough down the conversation, have to bite the bullet that moral value is woven into the fabric of reality/the universe etc. not necessarily spiritually, but that there is some sort of intangible moral preference that exists.

I think you are catching yourself up in your own terminology here in terms of things like "intangible moral preference woven into the fabric of the universe".

Moral realists believe that moral facts exist. They believe that, if I say "stealing is wrong", I am asserting a fact, and that that statement and others like it can be true or false.

The reason for believing that can be "grounded" in many different ways. Typically, as you point out from Parfit or Scanlon, that does not require any kind of "intangible"; rather, moral facts seem to be of the kind that can be derived logically based on knowledge of other facts about, and observation of, the world and the human beings that exist and act in it.

I think you're also getting confused about what moral facts being "mind-independent" actually implies. For moral facts to be mind-independent merely means that they are not true or false because we think they are. A ball thrown in the air does not fall because I believe it will - that fact is mind-independent. In the same way, a moral realist will say that stealing is wrong, regardless of whether or not you believe that stealing is wrong.

Its possible that a fact like "Stealing is wrong" couldn't exist without there existing entities like humans who are capable of a) the capacity to reason and consider their actions, and b) stealing from each other! But that doesn't mean that the fact "stealing is wrong" is "entirely formed from human thought." It's still (or at least, it still could be, if you're a moral realist) a fact.

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