Reg, Jake, Simon, and Fellow Unbelievers:

To expect AI to practice Philosophical thought and to act ethically first requires creators and owners who do the same. For once, here’s some words from both the “Godfather” of AI and from a AI component manufacturer.

AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: ‘We’re creating alien beings. I’m willing to be selfi…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What do you mean by “thorough and satisfactorily.” How do you determine it is satisfactory. What makes your interpretation of human behavior better than another? Those questions involve reasoning about evidence, explanatory adequacy and competing hypotheses.

A good example is conceptions of fairness, how it evo…[Read more]

Reg:

Sorry, I meant Thomas Nagel. But while I’m thinking of it, “What is it like for Earnest Nagel to be Thomas Nagel?”
😁

Reg, Simon, and Jake:

“Mister Earnest Nagel, call your office! A bat,a bee, and a flying squirrel are waiting on the Party Line! The flying squirrel says: ‘Again?'”
📞📵📱📠😁

If the philosophy is descriptive, then the main question is whether the description is accurate, not whether the describer has personally lived the experience. You cannot fully know what it is like to be another human being either. Even a complete objective description of a bat’s physiology and behavior will likely fail to capture what being that…[Read more]

But an AI machine will never know what it’s like to be any human.  At least I know what it’s like to be one.

IDK Simon.

You can tell us what it is like to be you. How much differently you feel after someone you love dies, after your bet loses, been informed you have a horrible disease, your friend is getting married. But you can’t tell what is like to be another human any better than an lLM. If anything LLM’s are better situated to do so. They interact…[Read more]

The Oxford article is good.

Here is the one part i take exception. “They cannot, by themselves, tell us whether those answers are well founded, ethically defensible, historically informed, or rhetorically misleading.”

There are or will be millions of agents and ideally they will train children to be skeptical and acute. Yea i know that is a…[Read more]

LLMs will never be able to tell us what it’s like to be human.  The philosophy I do is all descriptive, so it means reporting on what humans do and how they think, and painting a picture that purports to be factual.  The only checking required is that the arguments are thorough, that they answer questions satisfactorily, and that they’re c…[Read more]