Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Religious freedom protects people’s right to practice religion but not entitle them to restrict other people’s freedoms. There is also a distinction between the religious beliefs of soldiers and presenting a particular religion as part of the military’s institutional identity.

Should public funding be available for religious instruction, and how should the state distinguish education from religious formation? How can a government claim religious neutrality while displaying one religion’s commandments as a state-sanctioned monument?

SCOTUS to test boundaries of LGBTQ rights and religious freedom.

Battle Ground, WA’s Christian-backed invocation policy backfired when a member of The Satanic Temple claimed the first available slot. A government prayer policy that accommodates the majority’s religion must also confront the question of equal treatment for minority beliefs and non-belief.

World of Woo: How pseudoscience is duping football.

Environment:  CNN’s scary plastics report should be tossed into the recycling bin.

When does enforcing immigration law become the criminalization of humanitarian assistance?

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.

A discussion on how artificial intelligence can improve human judgment, reduce suffering, and advance humanist ethics? Will artificial intelligence change how philosophy is conducted? I think the problem Mathematicians now face is that AI can transport them directly to the summit without getting to appreciate the climb anymore. But what happens to math when the Universe becomes the Calculator? Do we dare disturb that Universe?

Perhaps the next scientific revolution won’t begin with a new observation, but with a new understanding of observations we’ve already made.

Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak is the largest in decades in the US. The last sentence is a stunning scientific discovery!! Letitia James is suing RFK over vaccine rollbacks while he is very busy getting more corrupt and dangerous.

Our Stone Age brains have evolved since the Neolithic began.

Can picking up a book really improve your brain?

Sunday Book Club: The Honesty Crisis. (See also first video).

Some photographs taken last month.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil.

Coffee Break Videos: Why be honest when cheating pays? One of the  biggest red flags in atheist conversations. The United States is Not a Christian Nation. Public Executions….so it’s come to this. Sorry, but I just had to post this.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Sorry, but I just had to post this.

I’m not eating anything from that bucket after Jim Bakker ate from the ladle, gagged a little in his mouth, and dipped the ladle back in the bucket, especially since Jim Bakker also hawks some bogus cure for COVID-19!

And Tubby singing a cover of “My Girl” in praise of The End Times is just cringe-y. And bean burgers??? Might as well eat Kolonel Klink Klaus’ Bugs mit Spaetzel “and be happy” as CRINK rains NBC death crud from the skies!

One more thing about the contents of those food buckets: They’ll probably taste just as bad 25 years from now as they do today!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

World of Woo: How pseudoscience is duping football.

If they want to stop dementia. maybe a good place to start is not sitting in a deep-freeze, but instead not deliberately hitting the soccer ball with their heads. Repeated head blows don’t do boxers any good! So why would they be any good for soccer players?

At least with U.S. Football, players have helmets and any head-to-football contact is purely by mistake. Usually, other injuries knock them out of commission.

Also, maybe if Academia and Society at large valued doing things with the head besides being a target for incoming objects and hits, a whole lot of people would be better off.

[Simon Paynton]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Will artificial intelligence change how philosophy is conducted?

I don’t believe that AI could ever do moral philosophy.  The moral philosophy that I do is descriptive (the only valid kind) and to do that, a person needs to know what it’s like to be a human being.

On top of that, why would we ever want AI to do our philosophy for us?  What’s the point?  I don’t even see how it could help, beyond some useful summarising abilities that some people possibly might want to use.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@Simon – I am happy  when the abyss stares back. It makes me think “Excellent. Now we’re both observing something interesting.” :-). I do not allow angst to terminate my inquiry. Rather it is a source of intellectual exhilaration. I have no loyalty to yesterday’s conclusions, only to the inquiry that produced them.

Philosophy is an integrated system of ideas, and the great philosophers were system builders. To be able to “do” philosophy we must know about and understand the historical problems it encountered and how they were solved. Hegel said that knowing a philosophical system is something more than just knowing its purpose and results. What is important is to understand the “inner necessity of knowledge”.

A book well worth reading is “The Unity of Philosophical Experience” by Etienne Gilson. Ideas, like actions, can have unintended consequences.  From the book: “In each instance of philosophical thinking, both the philosopher and his particular doctrine are ruled from above by an impersonal necessity”. In other words, the necessity governing a philosophical system is independent of the philosopher’s wishes.

Philosophy begins in earnest when we investigate why they said it, whether their arguments succeed, and what follows from them. So, Gilson’s  ‘impersonal necessity’  could be an intriguing standard against which to assess AI’s potential contribution to philosophy? I think there are many areas where AI will excel. OK, identifying valid inferences is only one part of moral philosophy but I think AI can reliably assist with formal logical reasoning, particularly when arguments are expressed in a precise language and checked by formal tools.

An AI could demonstrate that a philosopher’s conclusion follows from their premises while remaining unable to establish whether those premises are morally justified. But we human philosophers are faced with the same difficulty because there is no generally accepted deductive procedure for deriving every moral obligation from indisputable premises. Moral truths do not exist independently of anyone’s attitudes, including any God’s (the Euthyphro dilemma).

Out of curiosity, what not ask an LLM of your choice this question:

Trace the development of Western moral philosophy from 1500 to the present, concentrating not merely on what major philosophers concluded, but on the problems they inherited, the assumptions they adopted, and the new problems their systems generated.

Examine the relationships between Hume, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche, G. E. Moore, the logical positivists, and contemporary moral philosophers.

Identify significant contradictions, unresolved questions and recurring assumptions.

Then select one unresolved problem in moral philosophy and construct an original argument addressing it. State your premises explicitly, derive your conclusions, present the strongest objections to your argument, and explain what would persuade you that your reasoning is mistaken.

Distinguish established historical scholarship from your own philosophical analysis. Do not assume that the most recent philosophical position is necessarily the most defensible.

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers:

Evidently, the Turning Point-ers like eating parts of living beings like the Zombies of George Romero movies or like The Reavers of the Firefly/Serenity franchise, not to mention a-robbin’and a-stabbin’and a-lootin’ and a-shootin’:

‘Awkward’: TPUSA event with Jewish speaker sparks hateful MAGA rebellion
https://www.rawstory.com/ben-shapiro-2678071453/

Now, Damnit, I’m a proud Omnivore and Sapient-ist, but I would never do something so horrible to Bossy, Babe, Bambi, and Lamb-Chop! I wouldn’t even accuse The Late Charlie Kirk of something so gruesome!

And as you can see, Turning Point-ers like accusing others of things Christians have done ever since they first tasted power at the times of Constantine and Theodocius!

Granted, Ben Shapiro isn’t a bright bulb representative of his Tribe for keeping company with a pack of rabid wolf-sheep who think he’s a Christ-Killer who will burn in eternal Hell. Still, I hope got out safe and that this doesn’t turn into a U.S. pogrom!

If TPUSA comes to your town, Please, I abhor you: Hide your kids! Hide your spouse/spice! Hide your lover(s)! Hide your Parents and Grandparents! Hide your Pets/Livestock! ‘Cause they’re eatin’ e’erybody and e’erything up in hurr, up in hurr!

[jakelafort]

Enco,

“If TPUSA comes to your town, Please, I abhor you:”

Reimagine that sentence. I implore you.

[jakelafort]

I don’t see any reason the facacta computer won’t surpass all philosophers in moral philosophy.

Based on query i fed Meta about William Lane Craig debate i suspect it is a fait accompli. And why not. It is just reasoning.

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake:

Enco,

“If TPUSA comes to your town, Please, I abhor you:”

Reimagine that sentence. I implore you.

Great catch! ⚾

A little ‘Inside Baseball” from a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000:

Whenever Joel and/or the Bots are making an empassioned plea, They’ll always say: “Please, I abhor you…”

One of their many humorous tics of speech.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

But can philosophers handle AI?

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake:

“I have to praise you like I should” since you pay more attention to writing than Turning Point-ers* pay attention to their own Bibles.

A simple reading of the story of Noah in Genesis would have told them what The Noahchide Covenant was that Ben Shapiro was referencing.

But Turning Point-ers are too busy reading The Daily Mail’s latest “discovery” of Noah’s Ark. Either that or they are too busy listening to Candace Owens latest Ripple Wine Mom hot take on who killed their Cock Robin Charlie Kirk.

Candace Owens only contribution to humanity is to create Wal-Mart Door Greeters like Jeff Dunham’s Walter, since she’s always ranting that she has “receipts,” but never actually shows them. Behold the man-nequin:

(I call them “Turning Point-ers” because like the Pointer breed of dog, they point to and attack whatever their master wants them to, then turn and piss on the fire hydrant of Truth that might save their asses one day.)🐕‍🦺💦🚒

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg and Simon:

Will artificial intelligence change how philosophy is conducted?

While I would never want to farm out philosophy to AI or any other intelligent being, once they have a level of intelligence equal to or exceeding humans, they can all be partners in better understanding concepts in Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Political Economy, Aestherics, Logic, Philosophy of Science, etc.

But several things have to be done first. Creators and owners of AI who want acceptance of AI need to spell out:

What the specific, quantifiable benefits of AI are;

What the hazards of AI are and how to avoid those hazards are;

Then give evidence for all of it.

Merely saying: “It’s the New New Thing” won’t cut it to get acceptance.

Putting it out there that: “It has the power to destroy the whole world” will definitely not get acceptance.

And not presenting evidence just makes either hope or horror unwarranted and exaggerated, which never leads anywhere to human flourishing.

Which leads us to other things that needs to be done:

Creators and owners of AI need to seize back the language from the Naked Orange Emperor: What we have now is not yet SuperIntelligence and Superior Omniscient Intelligence does not exist, M’Lady.

Renaming things has no magic power to alter reality. Stick to your diaper-changing, Trump, and leave this to the adults in the room.

Creators and owners of AI also need to make it clear to protester of data centers that without data centers, they have no Internet, no E-mail, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Amazon, no DoorDash, no GrubHub, no greatest source of knowledge and commerce in human history. Data centers don’t have to be next door, but they do have to be somewhere. Exactly where take careful thoughtwith a goal to keeping problems minimal.

Creators and owners of AI also need to explain that utility problems with AI can only be addressed with greater supply of energy sources and water filtration and recirculation technology.

Nuclear, Natural Gas and Cleaner Fossil Fuels, Geothermal, Hydroelectricity, Solar Photoelectricity via Satellite, Windmills at Sea all need to be brought into the supply chain.

No problem with AI will be solved by a Moratorium or slowing down the development of AI or gatekeeping the entry into the AI marketplace. AI will just stay stagnant in the U.S. and will be developed by bad actors abroad who mean us all ill.

All rules on AI should be to stop accidental or deliberate harm, not to stop progress to better uses and good actors using AI.

[Simon Paynton]

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 consistent with known scientific facts.  There isn’t a lot of “reasoning”.  I know AI is good at reasoning: this isn’t it.

As far as learning philosophy goes, I think a rigorous and anti-authoritarian approach is necessary, as in mathematics – proper thinking.  Then it’s necessary to learn all the issues in the subject area.  That can come from other philosophers.

[jakelafort]

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 chimera and if it happens it will not be universal or close. And yet the capabilities of AI already exceed the vast majority of teachers. Also ponder how much greater the impact of a little AI agent who accompanies the kid everywhere and interacts constantly. Can have greater influence than peers, teachers or family.

To come at the issue of erosion of humanities a little differntly it is yet another argumentum ad popular so it is true & from authority so shut the fuck up. Especially the latter. There are so many who are already overcome by algorithms and helpless to question the validity of their AI slop. That is what AI represents to a great many. It is an authority. It generates beliefs, confirms beliefs and causes greater and greater ignorance. We have had churches, cults, evil governments to mislead humanity. Now we have AI. If you can’t think on your own you are toast.

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