:grimace:

Could you please start running your posts through an AI so they make sense? :grin:

Just do an experiment where all the OP's and comments are AI generated in one forum, and another forum where everything is hand-written by mere mortals. See which one gets the most traffic.

Davidson would say they have to understand truth to have beliefs. I don't think present AIs do. Maybe future ones will.

Generally, agreement is counterproductive to philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no disagreement without agreement, and neither can encompass the experience of a living being.

I'm aware that all appearance of agreement on your part is accidental.

Existentialism imitates "substantive content", to the point where the untrained eye might not even see the difference, but it isn't substantive content. Then the trained eye would grasp the existential proposal as a pure invariant form, even though the intent of the proposition is that it be apprehended as pure content. — Metaphysician Undercover

Pretty much, yes. You're agreeing with Adorno. I disagree that his critique hits home, but that would be for some other thread.

@Metaphysician Undercover

Explain why Adorno isn't a nominalist. It relates to existentialism.

This is my take, shoot it down as you will:

Existentialism says existence is prior to essence. It has a root in Kierkegaard, who emphasized direct experience over form. He noted that there are no words to describe 'that quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form.' But once that quality of being becomes the primary topic, the effect of rationality and speech creep in: we end up removed from direct experience because we beat the hell out of it with words.

I think this is what he means by:

The schools which take derivatives of the Latin existere [Latin:
to exist] as their device, would like to summon up the reality of
corporeal experience against the alienated particular science. Out of
fear of reification they shrink back from what has substantive content.
It turns unwittingly into an example.

He's talking about the forced separation between direct experience (which contains no form, no names, no recognition of ideation) and form itself, which is a key component of knowledge (scientia, science). And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said, so if I want to discuss it, I need to go to reddit. I don't know which subreddit, though. I don't think they have an Adorno subreddit. I could start one.

:up:

We ought not conflate the two things. I personally embrace AI for research and have had conversations amounting to hundreds of thousands of words with it, which have been very helpful. That's different from letting it write my posts for me. — Baden

I suppose so. I don't have any opinion one way or the other. :smile:

I don't know. It's kind of like saying that you can steal 40% of the bank's money, but no more. — Baden

I guess in an educational setting that makes sense, but if AI cures cancer, we'll all own AI as an extension of human creativity.

Once it becomes that kind of tool, won't universities embrace it?

This anecdote might help my case: At another department of the university where I work, the department heads in their efforts to "keep up with the times" are now allowing Master's students to use AI to directly write up to 40% of their theses. — Baden

How do they police that?

Is this thread geared toward philosophy students? Amateur philosophers just spend their lives struggling to understand the world, ping off a few cool philosophers, and spout what they may. Right?

:up:

By 2100, the average temperature in Jerusalem will be 14-16 degrees hotter than it is now. The whole area will be well into irreversible desertification. There just won't be any water. The flora and fauna will become desert forms. Unless the human population turns into Fremen, no one will live there.

Content is logically prior, — Metaphysician Undercover

Logically prior. That doesn't compute.

I'll give you an example. I was walking through a park with a forestry student who was learning the latin names for trees. As we walked along, he would name off them. I realized eventually that listening to him do that had put me in a weird frame of mind in which I couldn't even see the trees anymore. All I saw was the species and genus names, not the individual leaves and unique shapes as I was used to. I struggled to get back to my homebase because I didn't like seeing the trees as Latin names.

So you might think that this is a case where form and content are completely isolated from one another. The more immersed in the form, the less I can even see the content. You might think that content preceded form, because I saw the individual trees as just trees before I knew their species names.

But I don't think so. There was no point where, like Sartre staring at the root, I lost consciousness of form. I didn't know species names, but I knew "leaves" and "branches." That idea of formless content is a little bit of a myth, I think. If you could enter that state, where you don't name anything, you wouldn't be able to remember what happened. We use concepts and names, which figure in webs of belief, to mark out any experience at all. Do you agree with that?

"The pre-eminence of content reveals itself as the necessary insufficiency of the method." — Metaphysician Undercover

I read through that again, and I really don't know what he means by this. But pre-eminence doesn't mean "prior to."

But that issue aside, when you say content can precede form, are you thinking about existence preceding essence?

But that's the mistake of dialectical identity thinking which Adorno is exposing with negative dialectics. The two are not properly dialectically opposed, in reality, so we cannot say that each one implies the other. If one (content) extends beyond the other (form), then in the way explained by Aristotle, the former (content) is logically prior to the latter (form). Then, mention of the latter (form) necessarily implies the former (content), but not vise versa. Mention of content does not necessarily imply form. This is the reason for "the remainder", "the pre-eminence of content". — Metaphysician Undercover

I think it's like this: the score of a symphony is like what Adorno means by form. A particular production of the symphony, alive in time, is part of the content. The remainder he's talking about is the unique aspects of a particular performance, like the way the first violinist connected some notes and kept others separate, or the tempo the conductor set. Haven't you ever gone looking for the perfect performance if Mozart's Requiem? You're looking for details don't appear in the score. Yet every performance you come across is OF that one score. The score is like something holy and separate from the world. The content is made of sweat and tears.

I think I get what you're saying. Could you point me to where he talks about the "pre-eminence" of content? If it's not too much trouble?

Trending for Halloween!!

ok.

Maybe. If someone uses AI to create a fascinating post, could you engage with it?
— frank

Sure, why not? I would be more impressed if someone created a fascinating post by themselves, though. — Janus

You're the only one who cares how impressed you are. A fascinating post is a fascinating post.

It's that form and content imply one another (just as subject and object do). It's dialectics lingo/jargon to say the form is in the content. Think the yin/yang symbol where black is in the white, and vice versa. This goes back to the basic insight of dialectics which is pretty simple, but talking about it gets convoluted.

Marx called religion the "opium of the people," though ironically his philosophy is entirely ressentiment-based, and it is ressentiment that functions as "opium" for the weak and disenfranchsed to this day; — Tzeentch

I tried to disagree with this, but it's basically true.

All energy projects should get this kind of analysis.

Very simply gender is an expectation of one or more individuals in how a sex should act culturally in relation to the reality of its own sex. It is culturally sanctioned prejudice. "A man must be aggressive. Oh, you think a man can be timid? 'We' do not sanction such behavior." When gender is taken too far, it becomes culturally sanctioned sexism. So gender is very real. But its real in its culturally accepted prejudice about one's sex, not real as in a dictate that one's biology must follow because of the laws of physics. — Philosophim

well said

"But lo", some of the members of society say, "We know that God is a construct of the mind, not reality." — Philosophim

This is a pet peeve for me. Though people may use the word "construct" to deny the reality of a thing, that's not the philosophical meaning of the word. A constructivist's complaint about realism is that the realist is reifiying something that actually exists as a million diverse interactions between people.

A common example from political philosophy is the idea of global influence. A realist sees the USA as an agent, struggling to obtain influence in the world for the sake of its own well-being. A political constructivist says that the global influence of the US actually arises from a million little things like someone in Germany buying a bottle of Coke.

In terms of gender, a realist would treat gender as a thing. So your own gender would involve contact with that gender thing. A constructivist would say gender is dynamic (I'm sure @Joshs would approve) and made of countless interactions, some of which involves heritage.

Note that when I refer to heritage, I'm showing why we might have trouble escaping reification. Heritage is also made of a million tiny interactions, but in order to talk about the world at all, I need to do some reifying. As opposed to thinking of a construct as something that isn't real, think of it as a reminder that the world isn't made of comic book outlines. It's fuzzier than that.

Yes, very clear insight there. — AmadeusD

Nice to have you back, dude.

Don't look for an all purpose essence. Look to particular cases of use. I think the imperative to refer to transwomen as women was part of a political cause that gained strength very quickly in the UK and in the US. It's been subsiding, starting in the UK, and now in the US. One factor in the draw down was the information that having gender dysphoria does not mean a person is trans.

My point is that the contexts in which we would say a transwoman is a woman are usually political, and that scene in presently in flux.

I think you're just misreading my comment and not keeping it contextualized. My comment was responsive to yours, which started off with the word "really" as if to imply you were offering a moment of true objectivity. — Hanover

My point was that meaning is found in use, which is why I told a story about a particular case. I didn't claim to know something about it that isn't known to us all, and I don't even know what a third gender is.

So I see that you do believe a transgender woman is rightly called a woman. Thanks for the clarification.

Then you suggested we've banned people for such commentary, resulting in whatever just followed, which really is not helpful, considering it incorrectly asserts inconsistency on the mod team and sends the message to others, to the extent they listen to you, that we will not tolerate any opinion that even subtly questions mainstream liberal progressive views on trassexual speech or categories. — Hanover

I correctly asserted that in the past a moderator stated that he would ban people for disagreeing that transgender woman is a woman. That's a fact. I misunderstood your comment to be saying that a transgender woman should rightly be called a biological male. My point was that attitudes have changed drastically in a short amount of time.

Does anybody else want to vomit all over frank? This is the day for it.

But Hanover didn't deny that transwomen are women, not did his statement imply it. — Jamal

He most certainly did.

The fact that you don't know that a moderator threatened to ban anyone who denied that transwomen are women just shows you weren't paying attention. I always figured the sentiment was coming from a need to defend the person who died.

It's not outrageous to ask someone on a philosophy forum to back up an eccentric and implausible statement. — Jamal

Did you know we had a longstanding member who became trans and subsequently committed suicide?

So I actually have to ask you to point me to where it was said, or to explain what was said? Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong. — Jamal

You really want me to look it up?

I don't think so. — Jamal

Actually, yes.

To be fully objective, it's a biological man who identifies and presents as a biologucal woman. Your definition suggests a third gender. Mine is silent to that because that is disputed. — Hanover

Heh, we used to have a moderator who warned he would ban anyone who said what you just said, as if that was hate speech or something. I guess times have changed.

I see this from time to time. One I'm thinking of tries to baffle with bullshit. Best to walk away, right?
— frank

Sure, but walking away does not solve, or even ameliorate, the problem. — Janus

Maybe. If someone uses AI to create a fascinating post, could you engage with it?

1) A man is a male person because they had an xy chromosome, testicles, a penis, and a prostate gland at birth. His mature reproductive sex role is to eject sperm during sexual intercourse.

2) A woman is a female person born with an xx chromosome, ovaries, a uterus, a vagina, fallopian tubes, a cervix, etc. Her reproductive role is to produce an egg for fertilization by sperm after sexual intercourse, and harbor the developing fetus for 9 months. — BC

Sometimes people who become trans go off to another city and start over where they can be taken as their new gender. Still, sooner or later, they have to reveal to prospective partners that they're trans, and it's not a small bump in the relationship road.

So when we say that a transwoman is a woman, there's information we're leaving out. Really, a transwoman is a transwoman.

and the ways in which prominent members of this site have used it to make themselves look smarter than they really are — Janus

I see this from time to time. One I'm thinking of tries to baffle with bullshit. Best to walk away, right?

. I believe not entirely, — Patterner

What do you think the nature of the nonphysical part is?