The Work of Philosophy

When I grow up, I might want to be a philosopher, but I'm not sure that philosophy is clear on just what it is that philosophers do. A little joke, but I am allowed as I approach the 40th anniversary of my first job working with computers. Throughout my career I have continued to learn about diverse fields that interest me. Being somewhat of a polymath as well as a bit of a polyglot I have a diversity of interests, but I always keep coming back to these three: education, leadership and design.  I am interested in all of them in a comprehensive way which means addressing the philosophy, or wisdom of these things. I sensed I had to become experienced in practice before having the qualifications to discuss philosophy in certain contexts. It isn't really for me to judge whether my work represents a coherent contribution to the field, but just to do the work and enter the dialog. This must start with this question of the work of philosophy.

If I don't know much about what that is, then I am not ready to work as a philosopher. On the other hand, if I think the matter is settled or can be settled, then I've missed an important point of philosophy. Part of the work is precisely to do this meta-work of demarking and describing the boundaries of this great work of discovery. The work of philosophers has a history; a present, past and future where we work in the present, study the past and hope for the future. The purpose of the work in the present is to express the best of what all of humanity has to offer as wisdom, and to integrate this diversity of knowledge as coherent wholes.

As a student of philosophy I regret to report that the field is a failure in this regard. My claim is that the field has failed to provide any coherent view of the truth. Philosophers seem to divide themselves into clans based on various -isms and axioms. I would think that philosophy as a master field of inquiry and all associated disciplines seeking coherent descriptions of the world would want to have something like the physicists "standard model", which nobody thinks is a final answer but represents a summary of the best understandings that have been well established. Current problems of the field are formulated with reference to this model, and radical new theory needs to incorporate the standard model the way the relativity and quantum mechanics include classical physics in some scales and precision.

In philosophy, I can see the outlines of such a model, but it is held by a small network of philosophers who are not as well known as they ought to be. Part of the problem is that many academic fields and institutions are still dominated by followers of outdated and even discredited philosophies. By all rights logical positivism should be dead and buried, but it lingers on in mechanical often dualistic metaphysics of what we might call scientism. Science not as the effective methodology of working scientists but as the religious declarations of the believers in a souless world. The standard model of metaphysics must include a place for consciousness. The pragmatists pointed the way, and biosemiologists are picking it up in new and deeply integrated ways.

I know this because I was led there on my own journey of discovery. I find that brilliant minds have already gotten there before me, but I am distressed by the way this thought is often marginalized by the believers of scientism. In my work as a computer scientist, a designer and engineer of digital systems, I am very familiar with the nature of information from an engineering standpoint. Cybernetics is the subfield of information science that can be directly connected to biosemiotics even as we contrast the wild information processing, knowledge accumulation and even wisdom in wild systems with similar structures in artificial system.

I still suport myself as a working software developer and I intend to begin a more active practice of philosophy work. In my survey in an attempt to identify the state of the field, I have found that most of the historical accounts are the accounts from a political and social standpoint are either deconstructing or reifying materialist instramental culture as it is. When they deconstruct, they never provide any real theory of hope, and when they reify, they end up standing for alienation and injustice. I submit that the way forward lies in the production and implementation of a new vision. Pragmatism leads directly from Peirce's foundational semiotics to the new synthesis in the life and social sciences under the name of biosemiotics.

I have a number of projects in mind and have begun to work on a few of them. I want to do practical work in the social architectures, including financial institutions, necessary to support widespread peer production. I want to show that such a system can be both more effiecient in terms of scarce resources and more just in human terms.

Political philosophy and the idealogical construction of shared spaces. Firms, Markets, Peers, but what kind of each, free markets, fair markets, or for firms, caplitalist, cooperative (socialist or communist?) and non-profit or for-benefit. Peer production is mentioned with the commons, but that is a distinct dimension, the commons is a different concept worth its own inquiry.