When did you realize that philosophy isn't as mindblowing or enlightening as you were originally lead to believe?

Shortly before I finished my bachelors in philosophy. At least I turned down grad school I guess.

Never. After reading Plato, Aquinas, Kierkegaard and others, I am continually humbled and left to consider fresh perspectives on human life.

If philosophy is not being used therapeutically — that is, to address 'real' issues that can reduce someone to despair — then I can understand how it looks like a big circlejerk. A lot of philosophy is a circlejerk, but you can find small gems of insight from even the most frustrating thinkers.

Also, with the advent of self-driving cars, answering the trolley problem has become the unlikeliest trillion-dollar industry.

No shit sherlock every path requires one tobalso build the philosophy to buy into

are you the greek user from /bant/ who keeps spamming that image?

After I had begun studying it and realised it was mostly just fiction, sometimes loosely correlated to reality, but for the most part literally just fiction that pretends otherwise. Creating a web of associations with that fiction, oftentimes not even being consistent within that web, due to the vague and interpretative nature of it. Some of it is alright as an intellectual exercise though, just avoid letting it poison your mind. Which lends towards you thinking of everything in terms of that web: intellectual death.

Only retards would think that some clumsy observations and projections, given some fallacious, intellectually dishonest soft credit, are great insights of the intellectual kind. Anyone with some critical thinking, and an acknowledgement of the complexity of reality, will easily dismiss the vast majority of """"'philosophy"""" upon reading it.

When I realised that philosophy is a temporary solution to answering questions that we don't have scientific methods to deal with.

Little by little, we're throwing away philosophical investigation and replacing it with actual scientific inquiry.

What exactly was it that convinced you it was useless?

saved

have a (you) , my black brother

Well, my statement was a bit hyperbolic. I think metaphysics pointless. In the 2500 years since the Greeks we’ve resolved nothing. We haven’t even come up with any new ideas. Maybe some details, but somewhere is a scrap that already has most of the idea. I do hold out an idealistic hope the field will become tractable with the development of superintelligent AI or genetically manipulated humans. But baseline humans seem to have reached their limit pretty quickly.

Ethics, logic and such are fine; I could’ve gone into that. But instead I went off and built (a tiny part of the infrastructure of) cloud computing.
And anyhow it is almost certainly the choice which will prove more useful. (Not that I’m a utilitarian, but eh...)

Science is a subset of philosophy, and not one that can ever make ethical judgments. So there will always be some space left (unlike “the god of the gaps”.)

>"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

>*crowd cheers*

>with the advent of self-driving cars, answering the trolley problem has become the unlikeliest trillion-dollar industry
Not really. Ethical problems can't be solved algorithmically. Even if you're a utilitarian (which you shouldn't be, because that's retarded), there are far too many factors to consider.

>*pulls at your belt buckle*
>*slowly slides your pants down to your ankles*

>and not one that can ever make ethical judgments
wrong

>ebin szhobenhower sad da i dont hav to red or dink ad all

...

Ha, Mr. Harris and I have quite a few disagreements. But I think on that you are likely misinterpreting him, do you have a link to him showing otherwise?

Halfway through my undergrad studies I've had a realization that money is more important than getting a degree which you find interesting.

Does this count?

>being charitable toward a memelord
Don't waste your time taking people like him seriously.

Metaphysical philosophy can only go so far because there is only so much we can objectively observe of the unknown. Philosophy is forever limited by our own scientific and mathematical understanding, for those are the only objective methods of measuring reality that we have.

Maybe once we are capable of understanding what the human experience is beyond death, and once we are capable of somehow objectively observing it, we can now find application in metaphysical philosophy, which is why I think I agree with you in that the development of AI could illuminate the future of our species, as we can easily observe AI under controlled circumstances, not so much our own lives.

Months before I even enrolled into it in college

honestly. Nothing in philosophy isn't that complex or profound if you take the time to think about it. You can become an autodidact in 6 months with an internet connection.

If you want to actually come up with something though, you need to work a bit harder

>Metaphysical philosophy can only go so far because there is only so much we can objectively observe of the unknown. Philosophy is forever limited by our own scientific and mathematical understanding, for those are the only objective methods of measuring reality that we have.
Yeah except you can prove literally anything you want with science and math

Yes, exactly, but some answers we don't know yet because we are incapable of measuring them. It's beyond our reach at this point. However, progress is being made, and heuristics-based AI could provide valuable insight towards how the human mind, and hence, how knowledge itself operates. Is consciousness possible beyond the biological point of death? Can you measure human consciousness with mathematics? As of now, no, but perhaps in the future, we can find an underlying mathematical rule that we can apply to this conundrum.

My point is that science and philosophy go hand-in-hand. You cannot find answers for questions with multiple unknowns stacked on top of one another, just as you can't find out what y is if x is unknown and y = 2x. The two rely on each other, and one can only go as far as the other.

If you only pursue philosophy you can only go as far as the extent of your objective, theoretical knowledge. If you only pursue science you can only go as far as the extent of which you are capable of understanding.