Sunday School

[jakelafort]

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 with so many humans who tell them what it is like for them to be human after fill in the blank. Their data set is massive.

[Simon Paynton]

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.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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 particular bat feels like.A psychologist studying grief needn’t have experienced the precise grief of every participant to draw conclusions. At best you can infer, empathize, compare experiences and listen to testimony. but so can an LLM.

“The only checking required is that the arguments are thorough, that they answer questions satisfactorily, and that they’re consistent with known scientific facts.”

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.

Test Scenario: Give a human philosopher and an AI the same collection of your descriptive moral claims. Provide the same reference material, impose a ten-minute limit to analyze each human story, and have independent reviewers assess accuracy, completeness, reasoning quality and errors.

I see nothing in your description that establishes that those tasks require first-person human experience. You defined it (imo) as producing factual descriptions consistent with scientific evidence. So, if your philosophy consists of constructing factual descriptions of human thought and behavior, checked against scientific evidence, why would an AI’s lack of first-person human experience prevent it from evaluating or improving those descriptions? What particular philosophical task requires human experience?

Back to your definition:  “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.”

To me that sounds remarkably like empirical psychology, moral psychology or maybe even philosophical anthropology, depending on what you are actually investigating.  I admit that there is an overlap but I think the distinction is worth preserving.  A philosopher can use empirical psychology to inform a philosophical argument.

Asking “How do people form moral judgments, and what influences them?” is Moral Psychology. How moral beliefs vary across cultures is Anthropology. What do moral claims mean, and can they be objectively true is Meta-ethics. Asking people what moral beliefs and practices they hold is Descriptive Ethics. In fact your description sounds closer to Phenomenology if you are trying to describe the structures of lived experience, rather than merely collecting observations about human behavior.

Reporting on what humans do and how they think is not, by itself, philosophy. It is principally the territory of psychology, sociology and anthropology. It doesn’t mean descriptive philosophy is impossible here. What exactly makes your collected descriptions ‘philosophical’?

A philosopher who extrapolates from his own experience to humanity as a whole may simply be describing the white swans he has encountered. Again a case for reading Gilson. The philosopher’s own mind cannot be exempt from philosophical investigation!

[TheEncogitationer]

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?'”
📞📵📱📠😁

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

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

[Simon Paynton]

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 evolved, and what it’s for and what it does, in evolutionary ethics.  The most well known theory says that people bargain to get what they can get away with without incurring a bad reputation.  It evolved because those who took too little would lose out in evolutionary fitness; and those who took too much would get a bad reputation and lose future collaborative opportunities and therefore evolutionary fitness.

This sounds great, possibly to a computer, because it sounds like a plausible explanation for “fairness”.  But it fails entirely to account for the well-documented phenomenon of “other-directed equity aversion”: not wanting to see one’s partners get less than they deserve.  Never mind trying to rip them off as much as possible and hoping they won’t notice.  The explanation given is that of a sociopath, not a normal human being.  I don’t believe a computer would know that instinctively – you would have to tell it, and then present it with all your evidence, and then you might as well do it yourself.

I don’t exactly extrapolate from myself to all of humanity.  I use myself as a data test centre to see how theories hold up when examined in the light of my experience.  But I also use scientific data a lot.  It’s well known that people exist on spectrums with dimensions, and I occupy points on those spectrums.

I see metaethics as basically moral theory – talking about how morality is put together like a machine or system, determined from all the nuts and bolts from anthropology, psychology, all those humanities subjects.  From this model, it’s very easy to answer and make sense of longstanding metaethical questions.

For example, moral realism depends on having the goal of welfare, which we all have.  Once we have that goal, it’s necessary to do certain things – we ought to do them, as a descriptive fact.

[TheEncogitationer]

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 wise 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 selfish and choose humans’
By Leyland Cecco in Toronto
Tue 13 Oct 2026 05.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/13/geoffrey-hinton-trump-ai-tech

First, the Manufacturer, who is right on the approach and methodology for dealing with AI:

“I love [him]. I hate his predictions … All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,” Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the podcaster Ezra Klein. Huang, whose company makes the chips that AI firms require, dismissed Hinton’s vocal concerns that the pace and breadth of AI development at the “frontier” could soon outpace the human ability to control it, and particularly his warning that there is a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades.

“That [figure] is not grounded on science, is not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn’t make it scientific. Those predictions are hurtful,” Huang said. “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good. It is not true. So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence-based, be scientific.”

So don’t make any claims about AI without evidence, whatever and whoever the source.

Now, the non-predictive words of the “Godfather” whose heeding may make our future better:

Today, his concerns extend to the powerful figures building some of the AI models, and the political beliefs of those men. Hinton said that the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and the CEO of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI, Elon Musk, “don’t believe in democracy”. They see themselves as “Übermenschen” who believe they should “control society” and that Trump is a useful instrument in that aim, he said.

The US president, for his part, no doubt noticing how the huge valuations of AI firms have propped up the stock market, has claimed the only thing needed to rein in AI is a “smart president”, rejected any government safeguards in favour of allowing companies to regulate themselves, and wrote on his social media page that anyone who doesn’t use his preferred new term for AI, “super intelligence”, is “THE ENEMY”.

Hinton called Trump “a corrupt, senile felon”…

Trump’s use of “superintelligence” proves he understands “almost nothing” about AI, Hinton added.

“He’s taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,” Hinton said. “Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years. It’s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we’re going to call AI ‘superintelligence’. You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.”

In other words, AI should not be the handmaiden of Totalitarians who think their words are magic that can change reality. And rules forbidding harm to others that apply to all should equally apply to AI.

Geoffrey Hinton clearly sees the impact of the human mind’s capacity for discovery and creation:

“There’ve been three big revolutions where people ceased to be so important. The first was Copernicus, where we weren’t at the centre of the universe any more. How long did it take people to adapt to that? It took the Catholic church nearly 360 years to apologize to Galileo. And Darwin? Well, there’s people in Kansas that still haven’t adapted to that one,” he said. “Now we’re creating alien beings – meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around. And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”

And this is why developing the whole package needs more than developing intelligence:

“The reality is, we’re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.”

Much of that depends on the nature of these models, he said, and their capacity to understand how to develop good behaviour.

Some, however, are turning to faulty sources for conduct:

In recent months, the AI giant Anthropic, maker of the popular chatbot Claude, has held private meetings with religious scholars, theologians and philosophers to look into the possibility of teaching AI to be “good” and to grapple with the possibility that the models have consciousness. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said the conversations had drawn on centuries of religious and philosophical thought about virtue, compassion, honesty and moral character, with the aim of making ethical behaviour more reliable.

I hope none of these sources include the doomier anti-Anthropic literature and historic accounts of Abrahamic, Vedic and sundry other cults.

All the more reason to keep admission to the AI club open to better minds than the present club.

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers:

Bobby Brainworm and some rotten people in the State of Denmark are repeating a version of the infamous Tuskeegee Syphillis Experiment:
Controversial vaccine trial touted by RFK Jr gets go-ahead in Guinea-Bissau
Recommended dose of hepatitis B vaccine will be withheld from thousands of newborns by Danish researchers
Melody Schreiber
Fri 9 Oct 2026 17.36 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/09/vaccine-trial-guinea-bissau-rfk-jr

No doubt they are taking advantage of the poverty in this African failed State, as well as the general public’s ignorance of all things African and ignorance of geography.

Young skulls full of mush who didn’t know the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and the land in between sure as Hell don’t know anything about Africa. I knew it was in West Africa but even I had to pin-point it on a Wiki map!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

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

This reminds me of the scare talk of last decade when people were alleging that the bread used by Subway Sandwiches™ contained the same plastics used in yoga mats.

I responded by going to my quiet space and saying “OOOhm! Best Yoga mats I’ve ever tasted!”.

Turns out that the worst threat coming from Subway™ was their spokeman Jerod Fogle’s threat to children.

Something MAHA might want to meditate upon regarding the Trump Administration for whom MAHA is serving as a honey pot. A threat to children’s health with Bobby Brainworm’s anti-vax dogma and a threat to their safety with Trump’s withholding of the Epstein files.

Now all that, not microplastics, is a real reason to lose an appetite!

[Simon Paynton]

Here’s a programme that was on BBC Radio 4 the other day: “New Atheism”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0032s9x

[Simon Paynton]

mp3:

https://orangebud.co.uk/BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief – New atheism 2026-10-13.mp3

If there are any problems with the link, let me know.  Left-click: play, right-click: save-link-as/download.

[Simon Paynton]

Sorry, fixed:

[TheEncogitationer]

Simon:

Thanks for the link. The critiques of New Atheism were kind of hit and miss. Some with validity that can help, some just based on “vibes” or “feelz.”

One the speakers said New Atheism was “performative”. If “performative” means the dictionary definition–“being enacted as it is said”–does this mean the movement is speaking God out of existence or speaking the movement into existence?

The later makes no sense, since Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett didn’t make up the name “New Atheism.”

And the former makes no sense, because if God were real with all of his Omnific attributes, how could a God be spoken out of existence, especially by a mortal being?

Another of the objections to the movement–by an ostensible man no less–was that New Atheism was “masculine.”. Although Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett were indeed men, to make that as an argument against New Atheism is a Genetic Fallacy.

Atheism is not an attribute that comes with XY Chromosomes or with testicles and penises.

A negative lack of belief in a God (or belief in anything else) comes with birth as a human being. And a positive conscious disbelief in a God comes with use of the Frontal Lobes of the Brain.

Thus, Atheism can also come with XX Chromosomes and breasteses and uteruses and vagina.

And those with different combinations of Chromosomes and genitalia can also join in the fun of Atheism too.

As I see it, Atheism is not an gender-exclusive treehouse or golf club, but at it’s best, Atheism is more like a Hugh Hefner grotto or a Rozalla rave party.♂️♀️⚧️🎊

A valid argument against not the ideas but the approach taken by New Atheism and previous schools of Atheism would be use of ad hominem against believers.

I control the urge to use ad hominem around believers both in 4-D life and when they come on the Forum, and I try to be civil, but beliefs and practices of belief systems are fair game for ridicule.

When beliefs and practices are seen as part of personal identity, attacking them probably does come across as a personal attack. That might not be totally avoidable, especially when Life and Freedom are at stake because of belief in God and religion.

The criticism that New Atheists don’t regard Theology as a legitimate area of academic study isn’t a good one, since the subjects of Theology don’t exist. But I would say that studying Theology would probably provide added material for pointing out the absurdity of God and religion.

Overall, it was a thought-provoking, introspective podcast. We all could use some self-examination every once in a while.

[Simon Paynton]

Enco, I like the stuff about “debate culture”.  New Atheism has been good for that.

[Simon Paynton]

I’ve transferred the two .mp3 files of BBC Radio 4 programmes, to my DropBox account because they were eating up my bandwidth and breaking my fair usage policy.

So, the same files are available at DropBox:

The third man syndrome

[Author]

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