Intuition

Whenever someone asks me what it’s like to study philosophy, my answer is that it’s more of a training in defending your intuition. This is perhaps most true in the sub-field that I’m interested in: ethics.

Consider the following thought experiment posed by Judith Jarvis Thomson:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?

You likely have an immediate, intuitive, response to this scenario. That’s the easy part of doing philosophy. The harder, and more interesting, part is justifying this intuition. Why do you feel this way? And why is your reaction the correct one to have?

This is, by and large, how I’ve approached doing philosophy in the past 2 years as a philosophy concentrator. The tricky part of philosophy is making your justification persuasive, and to do that, we need to appeal to further, more basic intuitions that we hold. Philosophy, at least in the Western tradition that I am particularly passionate about, is quite analytical. Someone who argues in the negative to the thought experiment above—namely, that there is no obligation for you to give up your kidneys for the musician—might make this argument predicated on a more basic principle of bodily autonomy; that we have the right to do as we wish with our bodies, and if we do not wish to be medically attached to this musician (against our will, I might add), we have every right to disconnect ourselves even if it would result in his death.

You would be right to point out that this bodily autonomy principle is itself something of an intuition. We might intuitively feel that we have this inalienable right, or should have this right, regardless of what the laws themselves say on the matter. For the most part, this is a very easy position to accept. I heavily doubt that many, outside of perhaps a specific body of philosophical literature, would seriously argue against this principle. Instead, the complicated part is figuring out to what extent this principle applies to the case above. That is a much more contested question, which is what makes philosophy hard. It’s also an application that, again, requires some intuition. You may believe it fully overwrites every other factor in the case. You might believe it needs to be balanced against other competing principles.

The point here is that in philosophy, there are intuitions upon intuitions. A reader might not always share every intuition that the writer holds—it’s the writer’s job to convince the reader to adopt them. Yet the reader cannot simply dismiss them out of hand. Engaging with philosophy requires taking some of the writers’ assumptions in good faith, on credit.'

It probably does not come as a surprise that I’ve consulted AI on philosophy. I am, after all, still a student and a computer science concentrator. I’ve tried using it to help further develop my philosophical ideas, push back against my position, or outline perspectives that I’ve neglected to consider. Not once, however, have I been satisfied with the output.

Simply put, AI does philosophy badly. Regardless of the model (and I’ve tried several), every response I read makes me feel like I’m suffering from psychosis. For the longest time, I’ve had trouble articulating why. It’s only in a recent conversation with a friend that I have finally pinned it down: AI cannot generate intuitive points; it fails at grasping these very intuitions that make an argument persuasive.

Its biggest issue is that it will generate arguments that appear to be nuanced but fundamentally fall apart when scrutinized under the principles that we are meant to adopt for a given issue. The aggravating part is that it appears convincing, like it is genuinely in tension with other positions, when it actually isn’t: it’s missed the mark entirely. It doesn’t understand why the opposing view is intuitive, and so it can’t adopt those intuitions to make a counter-argument. It tries to argue for a take that seems reasonable, but is not truly grounded in any intuitive principle.

Its also far too pragmatic. Analytic philosophy requires us to be able to dissect the foundation on which your argument rests, so we can precisely examine just how persuasive your argument is. But also, you never want to tackle too much in philosophy. You want to show that certain ideas naturally lends itself to other ideas. Over-pragmatism, which AI tools tend towards, muddies these foundations and obscures the principles that justify your stance. When you appeal to how it should be done in the “real world,” you introduce too many confounding factors that are near impossible to catalogue. It becomes far too difficult to understand why your argument is persuasive. AI has the tendency to over-extend your assumptions or include more “intuitions” than you’ve made without telling you. This is why trying to discern what exactly the AI is arguing feels psychotic: it requires trying to figure out what the AI has assumed when it itself doesn’t know.

Truthfully, I don’t know if AI will ever be on par on this regard, because to capture intuition requires us to understand where these intuitions are coming from. But that’s the thing about intuitions—we often don’t have a precise, step-by-step explanation for where it came from. It’s not something we’ve necessarily rationally attained.