Reg the Fronkey Farmer

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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.

[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!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

But can philosophers handle AI?

[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.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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

 

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

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

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@ 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 the best sense of the meaning of the word.  His instinct is to “stay woke” to discrimination and prejudice of any kind. I spend time with him at the World Atheist Convention in 2011 when we did some street debates with what I call “Primate Change Deniers”. He is a great teacher when it comes to topic on Evolution. He considers what he will say before he speaks, and his goal is to educate people to think better. Some years later we “went for a Guinness” after this talk. I have a good war story from that one, which I can recount, if you like.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Rum Sodomy & the Lash was all the go in London in the 1980’s……..

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week everyone!

“Just because I might post an interesting article does not mean I agree with it. Which side would you like me to argue from?”

[Author]

Posts