Amit Karmon is an Oxford-Reuben scholar, studying for a BPhil in Philosophy. In this blog post, he discusses his previous studies before arriving at Reuben, and how his work combines more traditional science with philosophy.
My passion for philosophy started when I was a child. I did my BA Philosophy and supplementary humanities studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and graduated with honours. After finishing my BA, I went on to a 3-year mandatory military service in the IDF, at the end of which I started my MA in Philosophy at the Hebrew University. During my MA, I realized that I’m most interested in what appears to be an unreconciled gap between how we think the world is (according to modern science) and how the world appears to us in our daily experience. I started asking myself questions in the intersection of philosophy of physics, philosophy of mind, evolution, logic, and epistemology. I realized that to engage seriously with these questions it is advisable to gain formal education in math and science, so I postponed my Ph.D. and studied math and science after I finished my MA.
After finishing my MA with honours, I worked for a year as a “lab philosopher” in the Weizmann Institute of Science, at a lab that studies systems biology and genome evolution. I tried to apply some of the tools I acquired in my philosophy studies to help interpret the findings. Part of my work there resulted in a paper about causation in evolutionary and physiological timescales. After this, I worked part-time as a cyber strategy consultant. During this time, I studied a lot of courses in math, physics, and biology.
I am now prepared to get back on pursuing my dream of becoming a professional philosopher by taking graduate studies in one of the best philosophy departments in the world, and I’m immensely proud to take a part in what I think is the most exciting field there is. I always say that, in a sense, philosophy is the best start-up campus in human history, at least in terms of value-for-money. However, you need to take an entire historical perspective to appreciate that. Most of humanity’s most valuable assets started in philosophy, be it the natural sciences, political science and the concepts of liberalism, rule of law and human rights, or more recently, computer science. This is not surprising when you think about what doing philosophy means. In philosophy, we deal with questions on which there still isn’t an agreed-upon set of rules regarding how to come up with an answer to them.
It is only when we are settled on a set of rules and jointly judge in their favour that philosophy ends and science begins. It is when we enquire about the basic agreed-upon rules of a science that we cease doing this science and start doing the philosophy of this science. While it is successful science that gives short term returns on investment, it is usually philosophy that in the long term gives way to new sciences. Two reasonable candidates of field that are in advanced stages to stop being philosophy and start being sciences are natural language processing, and artificial intelligence and consciousness.
