“A philosophical kernel: biting analytic bullets” by jessicata

Sometimes, a philosophy debate has two basic positions, call them A and B. A matches a lot of people's intuitions, but is hard to make realistic. B is initially unintuitive (sometimes radically so), perhaps feeling "empty", but has a basic realism to it. There might be third positions that claim something like, "A and B are both kind of right".

Here I would say B is the more bullet-biting position. Free will vs. determinism is a classic example: hard determinism is biting the bullet. One interesting thing is that free will believers (including compatibilists) will invent a variety of different theories to explain or justify free will; no one theory seems clearly best. Meanwhile, hard determinism has stayed pretty much the same since ancient Greek fatalism.

While there are some indications that the bullet-biting position is usually more correct, I don't mean to make an overly strong [...]

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Outline:

(03:17) Causality: directed acyclic graph multi-factorization

(05:51) Laws of physics: universal satisfaction

(07:10) Time: eternalism

(09:26) Free will: non-realist

(11:05) Decision theory: non-realist

(13:25) Morality: non-realist

(15:24) Theory of mind: epistemic reductive physicalism

(17:25) Personal identity: empty individualism, similarity as successor

(19:07) Anthropic probability: non-realist, graph structure as successor

(20:29) Mathematics: formalist

(24:07) Conclusion

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First published:

August 15th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGakMbD7QKt88oMSa/a-philosophical-kernel-biting-analytic-bullets

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.