Interesting statistics about academic philosophy

[Alex K]

The Platonism bit surprises me. Really? Especially combined with a physical mind. Can.anyone who knows the least bit about neurology have good reasons to be a Platonist?

What about those do you see as mutually exclusive?

Ok, so from my somewhat understanding of neural networks, and my complete layman's understanding of philosophy - we understand how neural networks process information and dynamically divide incoming signals into categories (reinforcement learning for example), and I simply think that old philosophers who could not possibly imagine such mechanisms at work in our heads, felt compelled to explain why we know categories of things, to explain the discreteness of categories - well, we recognize a chair for a chair independent of its detailed properties (material, color... it's always examples with chairs), so there must be some abstract idea of chairness which is a thing in idea space. Today, I would think, even our rudimentary understanding of the technical details of the mind make this much less compelling. A chair is a chair whenever the neural networks in our heads sort the incoming data into the category chair, which they have learned culturally. and that's it. My gut feeling is the abstract objects Nestor mentions, such as numbers, ideal straight lines, etc. can also be explained in this way as a property of our brains, not of the world, because what is a straight line but a category that the neural network in our heads has learned. I'm sure Nestor, who knows much more about philosophy than me, can comment whether I completely misunderstand things here.