Kara Connor

@Enco – You made me search for it so here you go 🙂

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
can philosophy become more scientific without confusing logical certainty with empirical truth?

I would not go near AI to help me with philosophy, beyond a Google search result.  But if people do want to use it, I can see uses for it – checking reasoning, for example.

I think there should be two tasks, done by…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
can philosophy become more scientific without confusing logical certainty with empirical truth?

That’s an interesting way of looking at it.  Michael Tomasello, for example, is someone who does a lot of philosophy referring to a lot of experimental results.  That’s why I trust his ideas enough to give them the time o…[Read more]

Have a great week! The first video Bad Faith 2026 is very good. Christian Persecution in America is the intolerable injustice of Christians being subjected to the same rules as everybody else.

Atheism, n. The refusal to surrender one’s sense of humor to an imaginary audience.

It’s a point of view.  I recognise some of it.

Beyond Belief – New atheism

I will now be deleting the files from my web space.

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

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

Sorry, fixed:

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!