Metaphilosophy I: Philosophy as Extracting Implicit Patterns from S1 into S2

Hello LW. As I've mentioned I'm starting a blog about philosophy and physics. Here's the first post proper, about "meta-philosophy", i.e. what even is philosophy, and how could we make a program that does philosophy? I think people here might find section 1.3 most interesting. Without further ado: Intro 1.0 Since I'm planning to write some "philosophy" of a sort, I'm going to explain what I mean by that term and how and why such endeavors are justified. As we'll see, it's inevitable that the explanation is circular to an extent. 1.0.0 I'm not really going to try to explain or justify my account here in much detail, hopefully just enough to make the rest of the document intelligible. 1.0.1 There's two ways you could approach this, internal or external. We could explore what's it like to do philosophy from a first-person perspective, or try to describe from the outside an algorithm or system that can do philosophy. Here I'll do both, internal first, then an external toy model. 1.1. Philosophy as development of highest-level concepts 1.1.1 To start with, here's a sketchy account of epistemology. We have a collection of concepts, interpreted in a very broad sense. We have scientific theories of phenomena, procedural knowledge of how to do things, verbal knowledge of everyday things such as directions, subverbal knowledge of how to open a door, etc. 1.1.2 Concepts are justified by how good they are at predicting things and how useful they are for getting stuff done. Much of this is done via reference to other concepts. 1.1.3 Some concepts have a "hierarchical" relationship to others. For example, high-level concepts such as the cell theory of biology might be used to interpret and plan particular experiments. That theory might in turn be justified in terms of a high-level theory of how "the scientific method" works, plus particular experimental results. 1.1.4 We can climb these hierarchies until we arrive at very general concepts which cannot themselves be justified in t