Simon Paynton

Maybe the Toyota Foundation isn’t the same as the car company, I don’t know.

Enco

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378138739_Moral_universals_A_machine-reading_analysis_of_256_societies

TheEncogitationer wrote:
True, but do they get scientific grants from labs, either corporate or governmental, for their speculations, however interesting they may be?

I knew of someone who got a grant from Toyota to do evolutionary ethics.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Even the most generous bankroller of Science has to have priorities.

If the Thomas Nagels of the world want to be a Furrie, a Smoothie, a Scaleie, an Exoskelie, or a Membraneie and then navel-gaze over it, that’s their own business, but that may have to be on their own time and Dime.

There are people who are paid to do t…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Being a bee while being a bee, being a bat while being a bat, and being a flying squirrel while being a flying squirrel do not fit in the budget.🐝🦇🐿️💲

I disagree, you never know when something might turn out to be valuable.  There’s a whole picture of reality to be painted, and it needs all the pieces in…

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The most important thing a scientific institution can fund is the freedom to investigate a question whose importance nobody yet understands.

Trump seems to want to stuff “free enquiry” into some kind of box, but I can’t work out what kind.  I think he wants to make science come up with more answers.  I don’t think t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Humans are debating the possible moral status of AI while using AI systems to help formulate their arguments.

“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”  To give AI rights is the most frightening idea I’ve ever heard.  It’s already sociopathic, or psychopathic, in that it has no morality whatsoever, it’s entirely i…[Read more]

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]

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]