unapologetic

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]

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?