Dumb Philosophy

It’s supposed to be profound … but mostly it is trivially defused.

Make a mistake in mathematics and you start again. Make a mistake in software, it’s a bug. Make a mistake in philosophy and the world has to hear about it endlessly. This site compounds the problem.

Rebukes

Classic arguments that have been getting away with far too much, for far too long.

• The Chinese Room
  John Searle, 1980 · philosophy of mind

  A man with a rulebook shuffles Chinese symbols and understands nothing, so no program ever could. It's a trick: the argument trades on our intuitions about books, and any book that could actually do the job would be bigger than a great many universes. We have no intuitions about those.

• The Gödel Argument
  J. R. Lucas, 1961; Roger Penrose, 1989 and 1994 · minds and machines

  Humans can see that a machine’s Gödel sentence is true, so minds are not machines. Lucas dropped the theorem’s “if the machine is consistent”. Penrose replaced it with “we know we are sound”, which leads to a contradiction with or without machines.

• Gödel Proves Whatever You Like
  Debray, Serres, Chopra, Jaki and others · abuse of mathematics

  A theorem about formal systems of arithmetic, cited as proof that Lenin had to be embalmed, that God exists, that physics can never finish and that a bicycle cannot explain itself. One defendant read the correction and retracted. He was the mathematician.

• The Orangutan Argument
  Yann LeCun, 2019–present · AI risk

  Machines never evolved a drive to dominate, so they will stay subservient. But a machine doesn’t have to want power. It only has to want something for which power is useful, and a two-step coffee run is enough to show it.

• Mary’s Room
  Frank Jackson, 1982 · philosophy of mind

  A scientist who knows every physical fact about colour sees red for the first time, and “it seems just obvious” that she learns something physics left out. Nobody can imagine knowing every physical fact. Jackson later called his own argument a triumph of philosophical ingenuity over common sense.

• Philosophical Zombies
  David Chalmers, 1996 · consciousness

  A molecule-for-molecule copy of Chalmers with no experience is said to be conceivable, so consciousness is not physical. By his own account the copy finds itself conceivable too, and writes the same book.

• Just Predicting the Next Token
  Bender et al., Chomsky, Marcus, Chiang, LeCun, Kambhampati · AI

  It only predicts the next token, so it cannot understand or reason. Every distribution over text factorises into next-token conditionals, and for any algorithm there is a corpus whose best next-token predictor is that algorithm. The premise rules nothing out.

• The Stochastic Parrot
  Emily Bender and Alexander Koller, 2020; Bender, Gebru et al., 2021 · AI

  A system trained only on form cannot learn meaning, so a language model is a parrot. The authors named the tasks it would fail: a bear, a coconut catapult, three plus five. A pure language model now does the sum, and models trained on more than form do the rest.

• Only Language
  Jacob Browning and Yann LeCun, 2022 · AI

  Language is too narrow a channel, so a system trained on it will never approximate human intelligence. The byte count behind the claim measures a nerve, not knowledge, and the standard it sets is one Helen Keller would have failed.

• Every Known Example
  Anil Seth, 2026; Ned Block, 2026 · consciousness

  Every known conscious system is alive, so consciousness probably needs life. Every one is also made of carbon, and the sample was chosen by its likeness to us. Chemists once said the same of organic compounds, and an astronomer of flight.

• The Tao of Physics
  Fritjof Capra, 1975 · abuse of physics

  Modern physics and Eastern mysticism turn out to agree, once you pair sentences by translation. The theory he staked it all on was being overtaken as he wrote, and two afterwords insist otherwise.

• Machines Can’t Do Abduction
  Erik Larson, 2021; Jerry Fodor, 2000 · AI

  Abduction is said to be unprogrammable. There is a program on the page that does one piece of it, and recovers Kepler’s third law from six numbers. You can run it yourself.

• Machines Can’t Create
  Ted Chiang, 2023; Noam Chomsky, 2023 · AI

  AI only remixes human work, or never leaves the convex hull of its training data. Every human theorem is also theory A plus technique B, so “mashup” distinguishes nothing, and in twenty dimensions no new point lands inside the hull anyway.

• The Ontological Argument
  Anselm, 1078; Descartes, 1641; Alvin Plantinga, 1974 · religion

  The greatest conceivable being must exist. A monk answered at once with a perfect island. In the modal version the premise is equivalent to the conclusion, and its mirror proves the opposite.

• Pascal’s Wager
  Blaise Pascal, 1670 · decision theory

  An infinite reward makes betting on God the only rational choice. Multiply anything by infinity and every option ties, including having a hamburger. Make the reward finite and it is a mugging.

• Doomsday and Simulation
  J. Richard Gott, 1993; Elon Musk, 2016 · probability

  Gott forecasts the end of anything from its age alone. His rule gives a ninety-year-old even odds of reaching 180, and he declined a bet on six old dogs. Musk turned Bostrom’s three options into one.

Think a rebuke is itself a dumb argument? Entirely possible. Open an issue on the repo and make the case.