Simon Paynton

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]

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]

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]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
If not, then it is merely freedom for whichever religion controls the State.

Or, whichever state controls a religion.

Well, there’s no harm in learning from AI how it cracked a proof.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
An interesting opinion piece on ethics and moral identity.

That’s a brilliant article that I agree with.  The author is saying that in order to get people to behave ethically, you have to teach them about ethics in general, or in other words, remind them of what they might already have known.  In any given s…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What happens when hostility to knowledge becomes policy.

I don’t get why anyone would believe in stuff because they want to, rather than because they think it’s true.  I feel we have some kind of duty to the truth to be open-minded, independent-minded and anti-authoritarian in our thinking, and to let facts speak…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Is this post even visible to the other members?

@unseen, I don’t know what you want people to say.  Are you asking rhetorical questions?

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
cooperative breeding is also evolving 🙂

The Homo erectus cooperative breeding was the culmination of a long process of peeling un-weaned infants away from their mothers, that might have taken 2-4 million years.  Great ape mothers do not like to give up their babies to anyone else.  It makes sense that the first p…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Humans are born as socially bootable apes

This level of infant care would have required a bit of social interaction, since it would have been difficult for new mothers to be the only one caring for and protecting a newborn from large predators and other dangers.

This ties in with what we already know about Homo…[Read more]