Philosophy is Mostly F#@king Dumb

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

Honestly, I created this site because I’m just so tired of being mansplained to by people who think they are deep. I’m an applied mathematician who is inviting philosophers to get down off their pedestools. I don’t pretend for a minute I’m the only one annoyed.

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. Except the theorem says if the machine is consistent, the machine can prove that conditional too, and nobody knows their own consistency. Turing pointed this out in 1950.

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