Papers

"Introducing Executable Philosophy"

Mini Abstract

In this paper I introduce Executable Philosophy ("ExPhil"), a new philosophical methodology that enables us to compute philosophical facts.

The idea is that we translate philosophical theories into software, then use these well-defined algorithms to (objectively) compute the outputs of these theories given certain inputs.

One long-term goal is to translate/construct as many philosophical and physical theories into source code (read: software) as we can -- including the logical and conceptual relationships between them -- at which point we can compute the global repercussions of accepting a premise, or holding a new belief, and the like, throughout the entire system of ideas that we call "Philosophy".

(Contrast this with the status quo in Analytic Philosophy, namely weighing but a handful of repercussions throughout other theories and thought experiments, none of which are well-defined, and therefore we can't know for certain whether we're making a mistake in our reasoning at any point along the way.)

Status

Latest draft: Draft 02 v2, which you can leave comments on. Please do! I read all of them.

Draft 03 is due out late July 2015.

"Well-definedness Preceeds Truth"

Mini Abstract

In this paper I will put forth a kind of meta-theory of truth which attempts to precisely state the preconditions for truth (not theories of truth). (And no, it doesn't look anything like what Tarski did.)

Status

In the planning stages, but some of the key ideas are subtly working their way into the ExPhil intro paper.

"Introducing Abstractionism"

Mini Abstract

Abstractionism is a metaphysical/ontological theory that basically treats neutral monism as trivially true, then argues that everything else -- e.g., the notions of matter, physical property, mental property, mass, time, space, distance, numbers, as well as all other ideas -- are abstractions (in the computer science sense, not the "abstract entity" sense), and show that we can explain everything without appealing to abstract entities or any other non-physical, mind-independent entities (whose existence we can't justify anyway, even if they do exist, I think).

One upshot: we have no reason to believe in such entities.

My goal here is to say something deep about what kinds of things exist, and the sense in which they exist.

Status

The key tenets of Abstractionism have been sketched out, but I need to think about this more before working in earnest on publishing a paper on it.