frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

A Defense of Philosophical Intuitions

https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-philosophical-intuitions
16•Caiero•2d ago

Comments

glenstein•2d ago
I do think intuitions are a necessary source of pushback against philosophical skepticism, and am in favor of a kind of spirit of incredulity in response to skepticism. People pretend they are Cartesian skeptics for 15 minutes in a conversation, or a classroom, but go right back on to being a person after the conversation is over.

But on the other hand, I think a lot of disasters in philosophy come from having a failure of imagination, mistaking it for an insight into necessity and calling that an "intuition."

So I don't know that one should have a transcendent attitude toward all intuitions, I think it depends. Lance Bush is interested in moral intuitions and generally (imo) a great philosopher with great instincts, but I think what intuitions we do or don't have about morality are important, and I wouldn't want to wave those away because anglosphere philosophers have a bad track record with intuitions leading them astray when it comes to Mary's Room or the Chinese Room (what is it with rooms).

jancsika•3h ago
I think people are rightly skeptical of intuitions for the obvious reason-- they are shortcuts that don't come with easy verification that the "intuiter" knows (and can effectively communicate) the chain of reasoning that led to the conclusion. So you can't tell from the stated intuition whether the corresponding chain of reasoning is correct (or, for any non-trivial intuition, even if there exists a corresponding chain of reasoning at all).

Edit: Well, people are rightly skeptical of intuitions which aren't merely definitional tautologies. The author put definitional tautologies in their list, which seems odd. I don't care about intuitions for which everyone minus edgelords assumes that a thing is being defined in a sentence. It's all the other, subtle intuitions that require unrolling. E.g, if someone thinks it's wrong to torture puppies for fun because everyone has Ring installed nowadays, I want to know that! So I guess we need the edgelords after all :(

b_e_n_t_o_n•3h ago
I think we heavily overestimate our ability to reason morally though - our thinking just becomes an ad hoc justification for our own intuitions.
dfabulich•2h ago
Your intuitions are what give you your axioms and Bayesian priors, the starting point of deduction and analysis, as well as your values and top-level goals.

You can't justify any belief at all without axioms/priors, or make any decisions about what to do without values/goals.

Intuition is the thing that gives you those axioms and values; it's really the "only game in town" for generating them.

parodysbird•55m ago
There really isn't any Bayesian "prior" for us. We exist as agents interacting with an environment qua data stream. Every single moment brings new flows of "data" and as such there isnt a sense of having a prior and posterior since this milliseconds prior is last milliseconds posterior.
tomlockwood•1h ago
I don't think intuition is in the same class as "perception". I think intuition is better characterized as a byproduct of perception interacting with our preconceptions. I think fundamentally, intuitions are that part of the pattern-recognizing mind which allow us to quickly decide which tunnel is safe when fleeing a tiger. They are an antidote to indecision, but I think that perception is actually more reliable and factual than intuition in pretty much every sense, because it, in general, has some relation to the world that is thinly mediated by our minds. Intuition is the most unreliable part - it's mind all the way down.

So, to address the final two points:

> (1) if cross-cultural variance undermines the evidentiary value of rational intuition, then it also undermines the evidentiary value of perception for the exact same reasons.

No, perception in a sensory context has some relation to real or imagined phenomena. Intuition isn't predicated on that relation.

> (2) experimental philosophy depends upon perception to arrive at its conclusions (as do all experiments). Therefore, if we can’t count on perception to give us the truth, we can’t trust the results of experimental philosophy because of that very fact.

What about "I think therefore I am"? However, I'm quite frankly never sure I've landed on the truth as a philosopher, and I feel the same way about science. But that doesn't stop me trusting it.

No Code

https://github.com/lemonyte/no-code
34•Elliott-Diy•1h ago•9 comments

Affinity Studio now free

https://www.affinity.studio/get-affinity
885•dagmx•13h ago•603 comments

AMD Could Enter ARM Market with Sound Wave APU Built on TSMC 3nm Process

https://www.guru3d.com/story/amd-enters-arm-market-with-sound-wave-apu-built-on-tsmc-3nm-process/
22•walterbell•1h ago•1 comments

Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture

https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Linear
92•blackcat201•4h ago•2 comments

Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works

https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and-creative-works
123•nomilk•7h ago•53 comments

The ear does not do a Fourier transform (2024)

https://www.dissonances.blog/p/the-ear-does-not-do-a-fourier-transform
382•izhak•11h ago•120 comments

Rouille – Rust Programming, in French

https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille
32•mihau•1w ago•7 comments

Modifying a radiation meter for (radioactive) rock collecting

https://maurycyz.com/projects/ludlum3/
12•8organicbits•6d ago•0 comments

NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86k times

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/npm-flooded-with-malicious-packages-downloaded-more-than...
206•jnord•1d ago•132 comments

Springs and bounces in native CSS

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/linear-timing-function/
162•feross•2d ago•24 comments

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of On the Road

https://theamericanscholar.org/scrolling-through/
39•samclemens•1d ago•16 comments

Show HN: Quibbler – A critic for your coding agent that learns what you want

https://github.com/fulcrumresearch/quibbler
24•etherio•4h ago•6 comments

987654321 / 123456789

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/10/26/987654321/
519•ColinWright•4d ago•87 comments

Free software scares normal people

https://danieldelaney.net/normal/
550•cryptophreak•13h ago•353 comments

Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/29/google-amazon-israel-contract-secret-code
744•skilled•1d ago•302 comments

Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews

https://0github.com
191•lawrencechen•14h ago•55 comments

Show HN: Front End Fuzzy and Substring and Prefix Search

https://github.com/m31coding/fuzzy-search
24•kmschaal•1d ago•1 comments

Minecraft HDL, an HDL for Redstone

https://github.com/itsfrank/MinecraftHDL
128•sleepingreset•9h ago•17 comments

Lenses in Julia

https://juliaobjects.github.io/Accessors.jl/stable/lenses/
82•samuel2•4d ago•20 comments

Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

https://therecord.media/demark-reportedly-withdraws-chat-control-proposal
237•layer8•7h ago•66 comments

Zig's New Async I/O

https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-new-async-io-text-version.html
264•todsacerdoti•1d ago•93 comments

The Psychology of Portnoy: On the Making of Philip Roth's Groundbreaking Novel

https://lithub.com/the-psychology-of-portnoy-on-the-making-of-philip-roths-groundbreaking-novel/
28•lermontov•1w ago•0 comments

Roadmap for Improving the Type Checker

https://forums.swift.org/t/roadmap-for-improving-the-type-checker/82952
22•glhaynes•3h ago•2 comments

Launch HN: Propolis (YC X25) – Browser agents that QA your web app autonomously

https://app.propolis.tech/#/launch
91•mpapazian•12h ago•27 comments

ICE and the Smartphone Panopticon

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/ice-and-the-smartphone-panopticon
102•fortran77•3h ago•40 comments

Show HN: Status of my favorite bike share stations

https://blog.alexboden.ca/toronto-bike-share-status/
24•alexboden•5d ago•8 comments

Learn Multiplatform Z80 Assembly Programming with Vampires

https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/
73•surprisetalk•5d ago•7 comments

A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionary-tale-from-a-business-burned/
236•jemmyw•6h ago•157 comments

PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

https://planetscale.com/blog/5-dollar-planetscale
174•ryanvogel•13h ago•94 comments

Show HN: Run a GitHub Actions step in a gVisor sandbox

https://github.com/geomys/sandboxed-step
61•FiloSottile•6d ago•0 comments