If you already know the answer to the question you ask AI, then you can vet it. If AI is to be useful, then you musn't know the answer ahead of time — Leontiskos

A.I. is significantly useful to me, because vetting its answers is not the same thing as knowing them beforehand. It can point me to an interpretation that I hadn’t thought of, and I can then verify the credibility of that interpretation.

We're asking a viewpoint question instead of a truth question, and that's part and parcel of the whole nature of AI. — Leontiskos

Isnt a philosophy a metaphysical viewpoint or worldview?

If every action originates from the actor’s internal state, then no act can be wholly “selfless.” Even apparent self-sacrifice — the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth — finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning — Copernicus

I don’t deny that we are motivated to achieve k personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment and meaning. The question is , what is the connection between such reinforcers and our attempts to make sense of our world?


The psychological model you’re deriving both your concept of desire and self from is a bit moldy, dating back to Hobbes and updated by folks like Dawkins. More recent approaches within the cognitive neurosciences argue that there there is no ‘self’ to be found within mental processes as a little controlling homunculus, except as an abstraction. What we call the self is continually transforming its nature, meaning and purposes from day to day. It is more accurate to say that metal processes consist of self-organizing schematic patterns which ‘strive’ to maintain their dynamic consistency in the face of constantly changing conditions. Mental processes are designed to make sense of their world, and the best way to do this is to be able to anticipate events as effectively as possible, as far out into the future as possible.

The aim of this process of self-consistency is to assimilate as much of the world as possible into itself. This means that the ‘self’ doesn’t differentiate itself from others on the basis of a boundary defined by its skin, but by the limits of its ability to assimilatively make sense of others. It is possible for me to relate more intimately to a loved one than to myself when I am confused with regard to my own motives and thoughts. When I perform an active of ‘selfless’ altruism or generosity, it is made possible by my ability to expand the boundaries of my self, thereby achieving a more powerful self-integration by figuring out how to incorporate what I may have previously experienced as alien, threatening and unassimilable in the other. In other words, my most far reaching goals of ‘selfish’ desire are directly aligned with , and can only be achieved by, understanding others in ways that allow me to optimally anticipate their behavior.

I am not thereby using them as means for my own ends. Rather, their ends and mine are the same. My self-expansion is not fundamentally designed to come at their expense. This only happens when such attempts break down, and I cannot find a way to incorporate their strange way of being within my familiar schemes of understanding. The classical notion of selfishness as a competition among egos, whereby what fulfills my desires has no direct bearing on what fulfills yours, does not contradict what I’ve said here. Rather, the concept of the fortress self reflects the limits most people encounter in their ability to make sense of other’s thinking in ways that allow us to see ourselves in them. In sum self and other is not defined by spatially separated bodies. The non-self only appears when and where an aspect our our world presents a challenge to our ability to assimilate it , and we are not equipped to rethink our interpretation of it.

AI is providing you with a cultural opinion, not an expert opinion. AI is reliable wherever the cultural opinion tracks the expert opinion. — Leontiskos

Silly me. I thought they were the same thing. Seriously though, when I ask the a.i. to delve into the morass of philosophical concepts floating in cyberspace, I am aware that there are multiple cultural camps represented by interpretations of Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and many others. I find that a.i. is good at honing in on the expert opinions within these camps, but I have to redirect it if I want it to focus on a different camp than the one it has landed on. I will have to say something like ‘ you’ve given me a summary of the existentialist version of Nietzsche, but now I want you to contrast it with the postmodern version of him.’

As I understand it, the insight is what you’re supposed to provide in your post. I don’t really care where you get it from, but the insight should be in your own words based on your own understanding and experience and expressed in a defensible way. The documentation you get from the AI response can be used to document what you have to say, but then you’re still responsible for verifying it and understanding it yourself. — T Clark

Indeed

hat being said, a listing or summary of a bunch of smart guys’ ideas is not the same as insight. That requires a connection between things that are not normally thought of as connected. Something unexpected, surprising. The truth is always a surprise. — T Clark

It only has to be a surprise to you in order to produce insight, it doesn’t have to be a surprise to the llm. Unless you have exceeded the rigor of philosophical understanding embodied by the best minds that the a.i. can tap into, there is no reason it can’t enlighten you. If you were to climb a mountaintop and ask the wisest man in the cosmos for eternal truths, he could consult a.i. to organize and spit out his own recorded thoughts to you. Whether you knew he was doing this or not, you might be equally dazzled and changed in a potentially life-altering way by what he told you. Unless we are the best in a field, we can look forward to potentially unlimited possibilities for insight in that field by engaging with a.i. and the universe of wise persons it engages with.

For me, it’s not a question of clear and flowing, it’s a question of insightful. My experience with using AI myself is that it produces lots of surface without much depth. Lots of rounded corners with nothing that will cut. — T Clark

If I ask A.I. to compare aspects of the philosophical viewpoints of specific phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers like Dilthey and Husserl, it immediately wades into the deepest water concern f their similarities and differences. And why shouldn’t it? It locates those published works which employ such depth. But what if I persist with my probing questions? The a.i. will locate rigorous arguments pertaining to the areas I want to delve into with greater specificity and depth, including areas of ambiguity and controversy. And why shouldn’t it , as long as its database contains the writers who have pursued such directions? The key to an intellectually productive and even enlightening experience with the a.i. is that at each step of my questioning, I am familiar enough with the material to sculpt and refine the directions it will take next. I am its guide through the brightest minds in the field. Or can’t get there without me, and it would take me a lot longer to get there without it.

The lie that one is interacting with an intelligent oracle is too good to resist. It's worth asking whether it is even possible to regularly use an LLM without falling into the false belief that one is interacting with an intelligent and extremely knowledgeable person. — Leontiskos

In using a.i. for a field like philosophy, I think one is interacting with extremely intelligent fragments of the ideas of multiple knowledgeable persons, and one must consult one’s own understanding to incorporate, or disassemble and reassemble those fragments in useful ways.

I disagree with this. I was toying around with a bunch of disparate ideas that seemed related to me. I used chat GPT to help me figure out what they had in common. That seems like a legitimate use to me. I use a thesaurus when I can’t think of the right word for a particular idea. I use quotes when I want to add legitimacy or clarity. AI feels like the same kind of tool — T Clark

It is like them in that it is a tool. It is also like them in that it adds clarity, organization and information. It is not like them in that if one wants it to, it can present highly complex ideas, organize them in an unlimited variety of ways, enter into discussions with you how and why and when to choose one interpretation or method of organization over another, and do all this while spitting out direct references and quotes to back up its assertions at your request.

There have always been enough overblown and oratorical but poorly thought out OPs and posts here on the forum even without AI that I don’t know how easy it is to tell. Perhaps it would be helpful if people called them out when you see them. — T Clark

The A.I.-derived OP’s are likely to be better thought-out than many non-A.I. efforts. Banning A.I. is banning background research that will become built into the way we engage with each other. Think of it as walking around with a host of sages constantly whispering purported words of wisdom into your ear, and it is up to you to sort out what is valuable and what isn’t, what is true and what is false. Would I rather rely on my own knowledge than expose myself to the potentially dangerous influence of these muses? Hell no, I thrive on the opportunity to challenge my skills at vetting information.

If I am responding to an OP, I don’t care whether it is a human or one of the whispering muses I’m dealing with. I have at times learned much from my conversations with these muses. If the human who sets them into action doesn’t know how to properly guide them, they may of course make a disaster out of the OP almost as bad as that which many human posters have been know to do.
But I’m willing to take my chances with both the human and their muses.

I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories. — noAxioms

It’s even harder to do when you haven’t read the competing theories. You could start here:

https://unstable.nl/andreas/ai/langcog/part3/varela_npmrhp.pdf

Varela’s neurophenomenology is an alternative to “physical monism” in the sense that he thought the ontology of mind requires broadening our conception of nature. If you define “the physical” narrowly (as purely third-person measurable stuff), then no, experience doesn’t fit. But if you define nature in a way that includes the lived as well as the measurable, then you get a non-reductive monism (sometimes called non-dual). Some scholars (including Evan Thompson) describe this as a form of neutral monism or non-dual naturalism: the idea that mind and matter are not two substances, but two aspects of one underlying reality. Importantly. neurophenomenology is not anti-naturalist. It’s an expanded naturalism that insists first-person consciousness is an indispensable datum of science, not an illusion.

Instead of saying “consciousness just is brain activity,” Varela says “brain activity and conscious experience are reciprocally illuminating dimensions of a single living system.” And instead of saying “consciousness is an immaterial stuff,” he insists it’s embodied, enacted, and inseparable from biological and social dynamics.

Or here:

https://smartnightreadingroom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

Physicist Karen Barad’s re-interpretation of the double slit experiment in quantum field theory in the direction of, but beyond Niels Bohr represents the core of her alternative to physical monism., which she calls agential realism. She is one of the pioneers and most influential members of the community that calls itself New Materialism.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM

I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. — Apustimelogist

Well, it came from the co-originator of the research field
of enactivism, and the point of enactivism is that cognition, affect and consciousness are not computational or representational processes taking place inside of a head, they are reciprocal circuits of actions distributed between brain, body and world. There is no such thing as “qualia” if qualia is meant to imply some ineffable inner inner experience. All mental phenomena of felt awareness are processes of interaction with a world, not a private, inner datum. The qualitative , experiential aspect of consciousness is emergent, but emergence cannot be possible unless what emerges is already present in some fashion in what it emerges from. That is to say, qualitative difference is produced within material interactions of all kinds, as intrinsic to materiality. This is a post-physicalistic view of the natural world.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.
— Apustimelogist

:100:

I'm curious as to whether Joshs recognizes this. — wonderer1

If you wrote this after reading the quote I included from Evan Thompson, maybe you should re-read it. The issue isnt a choice between the physical and the mental, it’s about re-construing what both of these concepts mean in the direction of a model which is radically interactive, both post-physicalistic and post-“qualia”, post-internalistic and post-externalistic. The very concept of “qualia” as a private inner datum depends on a physicalistic metaphysics in which on one side stands third person , external, non-experiential materiality and on the other there is inner mental woo. Such a dualism tends to treat mental and physical as radically distinct, with one not affecting the other, or mental being epiphenomenal. I’m guessing your inclination is to stick with the physicalistic side of the dualism and either deny or ignore the other, as eliminative materialists like Churchland and Dennett have done.

t I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand — Apustimelogist

Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal cognition than my view, which is to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance. — Apustimelogist

You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? Whether how one understands human and animal cognition is relevant to the production of a.i. that can think like humans and animals?

Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.
— Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.
— Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc. — Apustimelogist

I’m realizing after my last post to NoAxioms that what I’m arguing is not that our technological capabilities dont evolve along with our knowledge, nor am I claiming that the fruits of such technological progress don’t include systems that think in ways that deeply overlap thinking in living organisms. What I am arguing is that the implications of such progress, which the leading edge of thinking in philosophy and psychological sciences points to, necessitates a change in our vocabulary, a shift away from certain concepts that now dominate thinking about the possibilities of a.i.

Im thinking of notions like the evolution of our devices away from our control and beyond our own cognitive capabilities, the idea that a thinking system is ‘invented’ from components, that the materials used in instantiating a thinking machine don’t matter, and that it is fundamentally computational in nature. I recognize that those who say today’s a.i. already mirrors how humans think. are absolutely correct in one sense: their models of human behavior mirror their models of a.i. behavior. So when I protest that today’s a.i. in no way captures how we think, I’m making two points. First, I am saying that they are failing to capture how humans think. I am comparing their model of human behavior to an alternative which I believe is much richer. And second, that richer model demands a change in the way we talk about what it means to be a machine.

In a way, this debate doesn’t even need to bring in our understanding of what specific current a.i. approaches can do or speculation about what future ones will do. Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. This gets into the most difficult philosophical and psychological perspectives of the past 150 years, and discussions about a.i. technology derive their sense from this more fundamental ground.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community. — noAxioms

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. Since I am a Kuhnian rather than a Popperian, I dont want to say that the older view is falsified by the newer one. Rather, the frame of intelligiblity is turned on it head from time to time, leading to changes in basic concepts, what counts an evidence and even scientific method itself. From a short distance , it may seem as if there is one scientific method that has been in use for three hundreds of years, and that new discoveries about the brain are simply added to the older ones with minor adjustments. But from a vantage of greater historical depth, it can be seen that all concepts are in play, not just those concerned with how to create the best third person theory, but whether a ‘simple’ empirical model implies a physicalistic account, what a third person theory is, what a first person account is, and how to conceive the relationship between them. For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomneology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room> — noAxioms

Yes, if your aim is to get your brain to do what living brains do, you have to start by keeping in mind that a life form isn’t a thing placed in an environment. It IS an environment, indissociably brain, body and world in inextricable interaction. That has to be the starting point. As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent , and ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body and a room, we have guaranteed that our device will not ‘think’ the way that living systems think. If, on the other hand, we take as our task the modification of an already existing ecology (biological computing in a test tube), we are on the road to systems that think the way creatures ( including plants) think.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic.
— Joshs
Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view — noAxioms

The reason it’s a question of the material is more a matter of the capacities of the material to be intrinsically self-transforming and self-organizing than whether we use silicon or dna strands as our building blocks. What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. Such a system can never be fundamentally , ecologically self-organizing in the way a living environment of organic molecules is, and thus cannot think in the way living creatures think.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.
You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not. — noAxioms

Yes, a popular conception of both living and non-living things is that they start from building blocks, and thinking is computation, which can be performed with any material that can be used to symbolize one’s and zeros. Add in non-linear recursive functions and. presto, you have a self-organizing system. This will certainly work if what we want are machines which perform endless variations on themes set by the fixed properties of their building blocks as we conceptualization them , and the constraints of digital algorithms.

My point is really that we need to listen to those theorists (Physicist Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse, James Bridle) who suggest that material entities don’t pre-exist their interactions ( or ‘intra-actions’), and the limitations of our current models of both the living and the non-living have to do with their reliance on the concept of a building block. Just as any material will do if we think of thinking ( and materials) in terms of computational patterns of ones and zeros, no material will do, not even organic molecules, if we want to have such entities think the way life thinks.

Pre-programmed, in contrast to self-organization. Its not some technical concept. For instance, you could say pain or hunger is in some sense hard-coded into us — Apustimelogist

Whether technical or non-technical, it is a concept, and all concepts belong to cultural understandings, which are contingent and historically changing And the machines we invent are stuck with whatever grounding concept we use to build their remarkable powers to innovate. Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.

You have then seemed to base the rest of the post on latching onto this use of the word "hardcoded" even though I initially brought that word up in the post to say that "hardcode" is exactly not what characterizes self-organization or what A.I. — Apustimelogist

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.

What is being hardcoded, effectively, is the ability for a system to learn to do things by itself without explicit supervision, which is self-organization. — Apustimelogist

What does hardcoded mean? What are the technological concepts involved? It is not difficult to answer this question for any given a.i.architectural blueprint. One can put together a list of such grounding concepts. At the top of this list should be concepts like ‘hard’, ‘code’ and what these do together in the form ‘hardcode’, but it also includes our current understanding of concepts like memory, speed, symbol, computation, and many others. If I were to suggest that today’s computer architectures and their grounding concepts are based on older philosophical ideas that have been surpassed, would you respond that this simply proves your point that just because today’s technological know-how is inadequate to model human thinking, this doesn’t mean that tomorrow’s technological understanding can’t do the job?

If I am claiming that there is a more adequate way of understanding how humans think, what stands in the way of our applying this more adequate approach to the development of products which think like us? My answer is that nothing stands in the way of it. I would just add that such an approach would recognize that the very concept of a device humans design and build from the ground up belongs to the old way of thinking about what thinking is.

So if I’m not talking about a machine that we invent, what am I talking about? What alternatives are there? Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone rather than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways of thinking about what intelligence means. In other words, they treat the archival snapshot of technological cultural knowledge that current AI represents as if it were the creative evolution of intelligence that only human ecological semio-linguistic development is capable of. Only when we engineer already living systems will we be dealing with intelligent, that is, non-archival entities, beings that dynamically create and move through frames of cognition.

When we create dna-based computers in a test tube and embed them within an organic ecological system, or when we breed, domesticate and genetically engineer animals, we are adding human invention on top of what is already an autonomous, intelligent life-based ecological system , or ecological subsystem. The modifications we make to such systems will allow us to communicate with them and shape their behavior, but what will constitute true thinking in those living systems is not what we attempt to ‘lock in’ through ‘hardcoding’ but what feeds back into, surpasses and transforms that hardcoding through no planned action of our own. The difference here with devices that we design from the ground up is that the latter can never truly surprise us. Their seeming creativity will always express variations on a theme that we ‘hardcode’ into it, even when we try to hardcode creative surprise and innovation.

When we achieve that transition from inventing machines to modifying living systems, that organic wetware will never surpass us for the same reason that the animals we interact with will never surpass us in spite of the fact that they are subtly changing their ‘hardcoded’ nature all the time. As our own intelligence evolves, we understand other animals in more and more complex ways. In a similar way, the intelligence of our engineered wetware will evolve in parallel with ours.

↪Joshs

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities — Apustimelogist

And can we also create life from scratch if we had all the technological capabilities? What I am going on about are the important differences between the cognizing of a living organism and the thinking of a human-designed machine.

No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market.
— Joshs
No so for devices that find their own models of thinking.

As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence
So similar to almost every creature. Name a multicelled creature they have a fossil of that exists today. I can't think of one. They're all obsolete. A rare fossil might have some living descendants today (I can think of no examples), but the descendant is a newer model, not the same species. — noAxioms

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment. This is as true of dinosaurs and do-do birds as it is of us.

While organisms without linguistic culture rely on inherited ‘design’ to frame their possibilities of adaptation to the world, this isnt just a one-way street. The organism’s own novel capabilities shape and modify the underlying genetic design, so behavior affects and modifies future genetic design just as genetic design frames behavior. This is what makes all living systems self-designing in a way that our machines can never be. A designer can’t ‘teach’ its product to be self-designing because all the tools the machine will have at its disposal will have been preset in advance by the designer. There is no reciprocal back and forth between machine and designer when the designer chooses a a plan for the machine.

In that the the engineers have the opportunity to observe how their machine operates out in the world, there is then a reciprocity between machine behavior and desiger. But this is true of our artistic and philosophical creations well. We create them , they ‘talk back to us’ and then we modify our thinking as a result.

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
— Joshs
Noted. How very well justified. Your quote is about LLMs which are mildly pimped out search engines. Compare that do devices which actually appear to think and to innovate. What do you call it if you refuse to apply the term 'think' to what it's doing?

The quote goes on to label the devices as tools. True now, but not true for long. I am arguably a tool since I spent years as a tool to make money for my employer. Am I just a model then? — noAxioms

When we build a machine it has a time stamp on it. No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market. As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence, because the humans who designed it are changing the overarching frame of their thinking in subtle ways every moment of life. 20 years from now this same device which was originally praised for its remarkable ability to learn and change “just like us” will be considered just as much a relic as a typewriter or vcr. But the engineers who invented it will have continued to modify their ways of thinking such as to produce a continuous series of new generations of machines, each of which will be praised for their remarkable ability to ‘think and innovate’, just like us. This is the difference between a human appendage ( our machines) and a human cognizer.

You might argue that biological evolution designs us, so that we also have a time stamp on us framing and limiting our ability to innovate. But I disagree. Human thought isn’t bound by a frame. It emerged through evolutionary processes but has no limits to the directions in which thinking can reinvent itself. This is because it isn’t just a product of those processes, but carries forward those processes.Evolution isn’t designed, it is self-designing. And as the carrying forward of evolution, human culture is also self-designing. Machines don’t carry forward the basis of their design. They are nothing but their design, and have to wait for their engineers to upgrade them. Can we teach them to upgrade and modify themselves? Sure, based on contingent, human-generated concepts of upgrading and modification that have a time stamp on them.

↪JoshsI think we’re converging on a similar point. I would agree that “truth” does not wear a single face. Its criteria shift depending on the language-game: in a courtroom truth is tied to testimony and records, in science it is tied to predictive success but also to the testimony and documentation that communicate, test, and replicate those predictions, and in mathematics it is tied to logical necessity. To borrow Wittgenstein’s term, these are family resemblances rather than a unitary essence.

Where I’d want to add a note of caution is that the factivity of truth still matters across those contexts. However we construe it, “p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are. Otherwise we lose the very grammar that distinguishes knowledge from conviction. — Sam26

If we’re sticking with the later Wittgenstein we want to be careful here ( otherwise feel free to ignore this :grin: ).
The grammar of truth isn’t defined across instances connected by family resemblances. It is defined by the particular instantiations within the larger family. We dont consult an already given conceptual grammar (“p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are) and then apply it to a family of instances. There is always something particular we are doing with ‘“p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are’, and this grammar doesnt just give us unique criteria but a unique sense of meaning of the phrase ‘ “p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are’.

Your wording suggests “truth” is a concept with multiple “faces” or modes of operation. For Wittgenstein, this risks hypostatizing truth as a thing. He would prefer to dissolve that urge: “truth” isn’t an object with different guises, but simply a word whose uses vary across practices. And every particular use, even within a single “practice,” can shift the sense. If meaning is use, then it’s not just different practices (“law,” “science,” “math”) that set the sense of “truth,” but also the fine-grained contexts within those practices.

Sam26

You’re right that to say “truth is a maintenance project of cognition” is itself an epistemic claim. But that doesn’t undermine my point... it reinforces it. The fact that I can’t step outside the framework of justification to make my claim is precisely what I mean when I call truth a “maintenance project.” To describe truth is always to participate in it, never to stand above — DifferentiatingEgg

I’m with you all the way here. I would just add that truth is not a unitary concept but changes its sense according to the context of its use. Human beings are in the business of construing recognizable patterns in the swirl of experience and then drawing from our memory of those patterns to anticipate new events. This is a richer and more fundamental process than what is contained within the thin and derivative notions of propositional truth and justification. We don’t primarily make truth-epistemic claims, we project expectations and wait to see if the way events unfold do it in a way that is more or less inferentially consistent with our anticipations. Events will never duplicate those expectations, so even when our hunches are verified, we must adjust these patterns to accommodate the novel features of the events we recognize. This is not epistemology, it is context and situation-based sense-making.

↪Joshs
I mean, none of this has any relevance to any points I am making. Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. I am not making any arguments based on specific assumptions about specific computing systems, just on what is in principle possible. — Apustimelogist

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think. As Evan Thompson wrote:

LLMs do not perform any tasks of their own, they perform our tasks. It would be better to say that they do not really do anything at all. Thus, we should not treat LLMs as agents. And since LLMs are not agents, let alone epistemic ones, they are in no position to do or know anything.

The map does not know the way home, and the abacus is not clever at arithmetic. It takes knowledge to devise and use such models, but the models themselves have no knowledge. Not because they are ignorant, but because they are models: that is to say, tools. They do not navi-gate or calculate, and neither do they have destinations to reach or debts to pay. Humans use them for these epistemic pur-poses. LLMs have more in common with the map or abacus than with the people who design and use them as instruments. It is the tool creator and user, not the tool, who has knowledge.

I think what he wrote about LLM’s applies to all of the devices we build. They are not separate thinking systems from us, they are and always will be our appendages, like the nest to the bird or the web to the spider.

There is no indication that in principle we cannot someday model all our own behaviors and reports through computer models. I think even just looking at AI now indicates that there isn't really a conceivable limit on what they can do given enough power and the right inputs, which is what you might expect from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle. — Apustimelogist

The results of modeling the brain on today’s computers, using today’s forms of computer logic, are precisely as you describe. And they will colossally miss what philosophers and psychologists are coming to appreciate is the central feature of brains; that they are embodied and enactive. So,no, it won’t be today’s generation of A.I. that can express this understanding, and it has nothing to do with power and inputs. In about 10 to 20 years, we will likely see the emergence of a different kind of A.I. operating according to a different logic, that of complex dynamical systems ( cds).

Ultimately, CDS-based AI chips may blur the line between computation and physical processes, resembling intelligent materials more than traditional silicon. As Stephen Wolfram notes: “The most powerful AI might not be programmed; it might be cultivated, like a garden of interacting dynamical systems.”

When AI chips fully integrate complex dynamical systems (CDS) models, they will likely diverge radically from today’s parallel architectures (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) by embodying principles like self-organization, adaptive topology, and physics-inspired computation. Here’s a speculative breakdown of their potential design and function:

Architectural Shifts: From Fixed to Fluid.

Current A.I. Chips:

Fixed parallel cores (e.g., NVIDIA GPU clusters)
Deterministic von Neumann logic
Digital (binary) operations
Centralized memory (RAM)

Future CDS AI Chips:

Reconfigurable networks of nano-scale nodes that dynamically form/break connections (like neural synapses).
Nonlinear, chaotic circuit exploiting emergent stability (e.g., strange attractors).
Analog/quantum-hybrid systems leveraging continuous dynamics (e.g., oscillatory phases).
Distributed memory where computation and storage merge (like biological systems).

From an external point of view, cognition is private and indirect. From an internal point of view, cognition is public and direct. So Husserl and Descartes can be both semantically correct, provided that we don't mix their postulates and apply them in different contexts. — sime

Husserl’s point is that the external , third person point of view is a derived abstraction constituted within first person subjectivity.

The second is fiction, while the first is an act of mind remembering (while I am sleeping) people I know and whom I interacted with. — javi2541997

I’m confused. Above you say that an act of remembering makes something non-fiction but below you write that remembering the past makes it fiction.

I can assume that a past version of myself is fictional — javi2541997

Even if I agree that strict remembrance of my experienced past is non-fiction, I dont recall ever having a dream that simply recalled a past event. They always tell a new, never before experienced story or adventure. I don’t think we are even capable of strict remembrance in a dream. Their style of thinking is not linear.

They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others
— Joshs
How can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you? — noAxioms

Their experience is available to me as their experience as seen from my perspective of them, through my interpretation of them. Thus, I don’t have direct access to their thoughts as they think them, only mediate access.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are.

Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist. — noAxioms

In his book Cartesian Meditations, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl praises Descartes’ method but critiques him for treating the cogito as a private object among other objects in the world, whose property is that it thinks. Husserl argues instead that the cogito is not a private object with the property of thought but exists by always being about something. It is not an objective fact but the subjective condition for the appearance of any world. Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Exactly by following my feelings, I came to the conclusion that you exist. :smile: I know that an image (like a mirror) can prove me wrong or cheat me. — javi2541997

What’s the difference between dreaming about me and being a novelist who writes a story with me as one of the characters? Novelists often say the characters come to life and tell them what they want to do. Do you think a novelist distinguishes between the reality of their dreams and that of their writerly imagination? Does my appearance in your fiction prove my existence?

I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics.
— Joshs

But everything in your previous post was "third-person mechanics — Apustimelogist

I was trying to point to methods ( hermeneutical, phenomenological, enactivist) which go back and forth between first and third person , between the found and the made, without giving precedence to one over the other, but instead showing their radical inter-dependence.

Even if I was in a dream, my ability to have these thoughts, including interacting with you, proved your existence — javi2541997

Doesnt the strange world of dreams teach us that just as important as the question of whether something exists is how it exists? Have you ever noticed that when you try to make sense of a dream strictly on the basis of remembered perceptual data (the identification of people, things and the actions that are being performed, like flying) the narrative of the dream appears bizarre and incoherent? And yet if asked to make sense of that narrative from the vantage of the emotions and feelings accompanying the perceived images and actions a much more intelligible picture emerges? For instance, one may perform an act, likely floating or flying, which in waking life would trigger feelings of joy, astonishment or terror.

But the emotions accompanying such feats in the dream may tell a very different story. One may feel bored , nonchalant or blasé, suggesting f that the meaning of the act should be sought in the kinds of waking activity that typically evoke such feelings. I suggest that if one wants to know what is really going on in the dream one needs to consult this affective narrative rather than the narrative of concrete perceptions and actions. This includes the identification of people in the dream. Dont be too sure you’re dreaming about so and so just because the dream image looks like them. The feeling accompanying the image may lead you to someone else. And often, what starts out as one person morphs into someone else. Follow the feelings , not the images.

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. It’s almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. — Apustimelogist

My point isn’t simply that different accounts of nature can co-exist, it’s that when you say “My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle”, I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. As to differing accounts being ‘compatible’ , I’m not sure what this means if they are drawing from different frames of interpretation. According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds.

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.
— boundless

I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing? — wonderer1

You’re missing the sleight of hand trick we perform called ‘objectivation’. The starting point of subjective experience is flowingly changing, never identically repeating events, out of which we can notice patterns of similarity, consonances and correlations. The trick of physicalism arises from comparing one person’s contingent and subjective patterns of similarity with many other persons, and then forcing these similarities into conceptual abstractions, like ‘same identical object for all’.

Not does this flatten and ignore the differences of sense of meaning between individual experiences of the ‘same’ object (private experience), but more importantly, it ignores the subtle but continuous changes in sense within the same individual. It is not only that I can never see the identical object you see, but I can never see the identical object from one moment to the next on my own, becuase the concept of identical object is our own invention, not an independent fact of the world. The mathematical underpinnings of physical science depend on the sleight of hand of turning self-similar experience into self-identical objects.

It’s not a bad trick, and allows us to do many useful things, but buried within objective third person concepts like quarks and neutrons and laws of nature are more fundamental, richer processes of experience which are crushed when we pretend that the first person is just a perspectivally private version of the third person vantage. We can keep our third person science, but we must recognize that it is empty of meaning without a grounding in the creative generating process of first person awareness.

I recommend Evan Thompson’s book ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’

“Science, by design, objectifies the world and excludes the subjectivity of lived experience, but this exclusion means science cannot fully explain consciousness or account for its own foundations.Science depends on conscious subjects (scientists observing, measuring, reasoning), yet its methods treat subjectivity as something to be explained away.

Consciousness is not just another object in the world; it is the background condition that makes any objective inquiry possible.To overcome this blind spot, science needs to integrate first-person experience with third-person methods, rather than reduce or ignore it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science — noAxioms

Third person questions imply objective answers . Objectivity implies flattening subjective experience so as to produce concepts which are self-identical over time and across individual perspectives. Such temporally and spatially self-identical objects do not have an independent existence out there in the world. They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others, and ignoring everything about what each of us experiences form our own unique temporal and spatial vantage that we can’t force into the model of the ‘identical for all’ third person thing or fact. The abstracting activity we call third person objectivity is quite useful, but it is far from our primordial access to the world and how it is given to us.

There can be first person as well as third person science. The first person science doesnt abstract away what is genuine, idiosyncratic and unique to the perceiver in the moment of perceiving, and doesn’t pretend to be a fundamental route of access to what is real.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are. They are about how things show up for one, their modes of givenness. They explain what third person science takes for granted, that the objectivity of objects is constructed as much as discovered.

↪Patterner
To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle. — Apustimelogist

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In dealing with the non-living world, we make use of accounts which are quite useful to us in building workable technologies. But these same accounts, when applied to living organisms and parts of organisms, like brains, show their limits.

We may want a reductive explanation of brain activity for certain purposes, like studying individual neurons or clusters of neurons. But if we want a model to describe perceptual-motor processes and their relation to cognitive-affective behaviors, and the relation between individual cognitive-affective processes and intersubjective and ecological interactions, and we need to show the inseparability of these phenomena, including the inseparability of brain, body and environment, and emotion and cognition, we will want an account which does not isolate something we call ‘brain’ from this larger ecology, and then reduce its functioning to a causal ‘mechanics’.

We will need a model which understands consciousness as a kind of functional unification and integration of these inseparable processes. Applying a non- linear complex systems approach can be a good start, but even here we have to be careful not to make this too reductive.

I read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard. — noAxioms

You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. And I imagine that from your perspective it doesn’t help that Chalmers only claims to tell us what third person accounts can’t do, without offering a satisfying alternative model of causality or motivation we can apply to those natural phenomena ( first person experience) the third-person account cannot account for adequately.

But while Chalmers falls short in this regard, a range of philosophical accounts dating back 150 years to Dilthey’s hermeneutics, do offer concrete alternatives to material causality. Some, like Dilthey and embodied cognitive science, allow methods strictly applicable to the human and psychological sciences to sit alongside methods designed for the physical sciences. Others , such as Gadamer with his more radical hermeneutics, the intentional phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty , Husserl and Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and post-structuralism, see the methods of third person science as secondary to and derivative of the more primary accounts they offer.

Consciousness studies is a burgeoning field in philosophy of mind and psychology , and I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness, their predictive and explanatory usefulness is profoundly thin and impoverished in comparison with accounts which believe that third-person accounts are valuable, but they abstract from experience. Third person accounts describe patterns, correlations, or generalities that can be applied across people. However, they cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing. They must remain accountable to and enrich first-person experiencing, not replace it.

Here's a thing - what does "abduction" mean? Even the SEP article can't say. So now you claim it's just making up an hypothesis. So why not just call it "hypothesising"? Why the new name — Banno

My preferred approaches to philosophy of science find the concept of abduction problematic for a number of reasons. First, abduction is too rationalistic; real science is more anarchic. Second, abduction misses the paradigm-dependence of hypothesis generation. And third, abduction isn’t a universal logic but a practice-specific activity embedded in forms of life. Maybe this is at least somewhat consistent with your objections.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. The issue concerns what is reduction as much and maybe more than any particular model of consciousness.

Neither side of the divide is presented as a given. The frames of reference are incongruent — Paine

Good point. Chalmers is suspicious of reductionism because he sees the form of description on the basis of which consciousness would be reduced ( empirical causality, eliminative materialism) to be incompatible with the form of causality or motivation applicable to
consciousness. His proposed solution (panpsychism) lets us use empirically causal methods while at the same time honoring the peculiar status of consciousness by embedding consciousness within material things.

The phenomenological approach follows Chalmers in not wanting to reduce consciousness to material causality in eliminative fashion. But it departs from Chalmers in not wanting to maintain a dualism between third person causality and first person awareness. Its solution is to reduce material causality to subjective motivational processes. That is, it sees material causality as a secondary , derived abstraction, not as a method which deserves equal billing with consciousness.

. Maybe someone knows other approaches? — Astorre

There’s repentance. I don’t mean this in a religious sense, but as re-construal. The best way to appreciate anything in our life is to refresh its meaning for us. Simple attention won’t do this. Stare at anything long enough and it disappears. We must always re-construe in order to retain relevance. The world is amenable to an indefinite variety of ways we can make sense of it. When one is feeling bored, stuck in a rut, despondent or riddled with guilt for not appreciating others, the best route to gratitude is to take up audacity , re-invention and experimentation. Treat the self as a work of art in continual state of re-creation. Appreciate what you have through re-enchantment, and re-enchant through transformation.

Here’s a counter to apokrisis‘s treatment of causality from an enactivist perspective. I’m curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood.

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. In the enactive framework, context isn’t an add-on or backdrop but constitutive of meaning and action. The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. These causal relations are open-ended, historical, and enacted, not closed or total. Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. It’s not that the atom has freedom and the void constrains it; rather, the atom–void system is a co-defined relation, a process without independent parts.