Kara Connor

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

Sorry, fixed:

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.

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

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

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]

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.

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]

But can philosophers handle AI?

@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 inte…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

Have a great week!

I think a bucket is a more appropriate coffin for Bakker than a matchbox.

Read the news about that charlatan and liar for Jesus yesterday….and the same  Hitchens quote came to mind :-). A brilliant one liner.

I posted the video and then deleted any commentary I had included. No need for me to add any.

Yes, I will post the story later. FYI – Sorry, I posted a very recent video of his, not the one he gave in Dublin.

@ Enco – I sincerely hope AronRa only means he is the former sense of “woke” because he is a much better thinker than the latter sense of “woke” deserves, though this may be a Wishful thinking Fallacy on my part, since “Wokeism”. in the latter sense, has seemingly consumed everything and everyone.

I can confirm that AronRa is “woke” in t…[Read more]