It can be argued that the understanding manifested by language models lacks grounding or is not "real" in the sense that no "feeling" or "consciousness" attaches to it. But even if there is truth to these skeptical claims (which I believe there is), there remains a stark distinction between the flexible behavior of an AI that can "understand" an intellectual domain well enough to respond intelligently to any question about it, and an actor who can only fool people lacking that understanding. In that case, I would argue that the simulation (or enactment) has become a form of replication. — Pierre-Normand

It can be also questioned if "understanding" is anything but feeling, or recognition, of some intellectual process. Something we just witness, or then we don't. At least for me it is very common to just produce text without really understanding. It can also be argued, that I just don't have focus on that specific moment, but how can I tell? Maybe I'm just now continuing your prompt.

I think these are two different perspectives. We can ask similar questions for any complex system. So in my opinion this goes all the way back to Aristotle. Answer #1 would be the efficient cause and answer #2 the final cause.

While its a little antiquated — 013zen

I'm not sure if this is antiquated at all. To me it looks like many contemporary discussions in the constructivist and finitist context is very much in line with Kant's views on the nature of mathematics.

That's very interesting! I'm more of an audio type of person I guess. So I constantly "hear" the words when I'm thinking or writing. Well I don't really hear them, but they more or less just pop out of somewhere and if I really pay attention, I guess they are kinda the same as in trying to remember or reproduce music. So "mind's ear", I suppose. Sometimes I also see some text, but I suppose it has more to do with me making some intense notes to some page of a book, and then remembering that situation.

Lately I've been thinking that maybe human thought really is some kind of language model. We expose ourselves to massive amount of text and discussion, and then just "continue the prompt". Well I'm not saying this very seriously, but for sure I'm going to prepare myself to that scenario by reading and writing as much as I can. It will be good for me in any case.

For me, lucid dreaming was more pragmatic than philosophical. — Gnomon

I also tend to think this way. I started to practice lucid dreaming maybe around 15 years ago, and first encounters were very intense and immediately turned me into some type of idealist. It was clear to me that the reality is a dream of sort. So when we are awake, we just dream a bit different type of dreams, stable and objective dreams. The material that causes dreams is just different, but the mechanism is the same. Anyone how practices lucid dreaming knows that dreams feel the same as the reality, even more so.

This is basically still how I see it. When we sleep, the material of dreams are subjective artefacts and some random brain activity, and when we are awake, the dream material is more stable and objective. I don't really know what to make out of this. It can be interpreted in realist framework, or maybe transcendental idealist framework. Either way, the phenomenal reality is made out of the same stuff that our dreams, there's no difference in qualitative terms. This may sound obvious to some people, but it was a revelation for me.

This is very pragmatic for me, it is just how things are, but I still get very excited with lucid dreams. Nowadays I never try to actively engage with the dreams, I just let them happen and observe.

Interesting! I think Leibniz would approve Cyc project.

It's far from original to say that Wittgenstein's philosophy has a lot in common with Kant's — Jamal

There are striking similarities, but that's basically true for everyone else as well. Kant seems to be the dividing line in the history of philosophy, and everything is reaction to Kant, if one wants just to see it that way. It is still interesting to think about if Wittgenstein never read Kant properly.

Here's the context — Banno

Thanks, interesting article.

I didn't find in that, or in any posts in this thread, anything mathematically interesting PM critique of mathematics. I suppose the reason is that there's none.

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here).

This is also how I see it. We can of course debate on what exactly are these rules based on, be it a concept of unity, negation etc. but it looks to me that the absolutely minimal set of concepts is not culturally defined, but something like Kantian, universal categories. When we establish the rules, for example Peano axioms, it is not debatable if those rules won't work (unless of course there's a flaw in the rules). It's another thing if some culture refuses to use a set of rules.

Another way to think about this, using terminology I don't believe was available to Kant: Objectivity would be universal intersubjectivity. — J

I think this is precisely what Kant was saying, in his terms. Objectivity as we understand it, is universal for humans. This is something Kant keeps on repeating in CPR. But of course it is a bit strange thing to say because it is obvious, that the same forms of perception and categories apply to non-human animals as well.

I don't know what to make out of this. It seems like there's heavy Leibnizian influence in the underlying metaphysics that Kant cannot spell out because of his goals in CPR. So it is all about interplay of subjects that all have the universal form of consciousness, but what kind of subjects? Any type of consciousness? Humans, animals, even non-animate "subjects"?

I'd like to get my hands on Opus Postunum. There's just so many open questions in CPR!

It was mine too, until I read pre-Kantians, from Descartes to Hume, they are significantly richer than as they are usually presented. Part of the reason I have a slight "push-back" feeling to Kant, despite genuinely admiring him, is that once I did read the classics, I found them to be supremely rich. — Manuel

I also enjoy pre-Kantians very much! At the moment I'm especially interested in Leibniz, who is definitely one of the "bad guys" in CPR and a huge influence. There seems to be some connection between Cudworth (which I haven't read at all) and Leibniz, so it is going to be very interesting to find out something about this as well. These people worked as little in vacuum as we do, but the literary practices were much more liberate, at least compared to academic philosophy of today.

I have to confess that I haven't read Locke outside of basic text books, so I always thought the distinction between primary and secondary qualities a bit differently. To my understanding Locke thought that we cannot represent the corpuscular microstructure of objects, but there's at least some sort of correspondence to the perceived secondary qualities. Nothing prevents us in principle to penetrate deeper and deeper to corpuscular microstructures, and thus learn about the reality with scientific method. So yes, in a way the ultimate structure is unreachable and "noumenon", but it is conceptually different kind of noumena from Kant's, in my interpretation. And yes, my knowledge of Locke is thin and based on entry level text books.

Kant actually acknowledges this feature of Locke's work in CPR, but also maintains that Locke didn't go far enough. So in my interpretation Kant says that also the corpuscular microstructure (if there's such a thing for Kant - this is not clear in CPR) is also part of phenomenal world. We don't know if we ever reach the ultimate atomic structure of substances, and we don't even know if there is such a thing in the first place. Noumena for Kant is something totally outside all of this. (So I'm here following the metaphysical interpretation, I guess). Outside our representations, which include both primary and secondary qualities, there's nothing for us. For God, maybe.

I do not think the way he presents his thought, as being "Copernican" or so radically new, to be, neither as new as he presents, nor as radical as he claims it to be. One clearly sees very strong anticipations of the noumena in Locke's discussion on "substance". — Manuel

I'm slightly and politely disagreeing here. Locke's theory is representational in traditional way: there's an objective world out there, and the contents of consciousness reflect this with its representations. This is pretty much what Aristotle and scholastics would say. Kant, on the other hand, completely cut this connection. The representations we have are the ultimate, objective, concrete world, and there's nothing else we can ever know about. Noumena is the non-sensitive cause of the world, and as such, one just wonders what's the use of it. This is precisely what people like Hegel, Peirce and other people made out of it. For sure we can do science and live our life without ever paying any attention to noumena, or any other sort of "hinterworld".

I think it's more about some specific quality of melancholy that I cannot find in other era's. It's special for me.

Lately been listening to a lot of baroque music. There's something strange in it that I cannot explain.

And it is rather simple, animals cannot be moral because they display an insufficiency in thought capacity, which indicates they are incapable of the type of abstract thinking that ethics is dependent upon. — Merkwurdichliebe

We said the same about animal intelligence and feelings, not long time ago. Is moral something totally different?

If I'm not mistaken, according to natural sciences, there's nothing special in human beings in any regard. So whatever is intelligence, all animals have that sort of thing, to some degree. Why would moral be any different? I think the only argument would be something like humans being literally God's image, supreme special being and animals are just some kind of biological machines.

Of course we can define moral as somehing very human specific.

Ok, thanks. What I mean with "relativism" is the opposition of universalism, that is all facts are relative to some perspective.

So are you actually referring to some thuth-condition theory or are we just using different words here?

I think all truths are conditional — Jackson

I suppose this is different than relativism?

I've actually never grasped the problem others have tried to convey since I cannot identify anything unexplainable by natural means. So explain the problem to me, since I apparently don't see one. — noAxioms

To me all knowledge seems to be part of the same "hard problem": how to explain things outside human congnitive faculties, using the very same faculties. That's nothing but magical to me. So explaining these faculties is not really any different. It's all magic.

I suppose philosopy was always tightly connectected to science of the day, at least up to and including Whiteheads strange metaphysics. I'm not exactly sure what happened after that. What's the role of philosophy today? To me it looks like it's a mere "metascience", tool for understanding basics of other science, analyzing its own history etc.

I don't think the idea that killing / mistreating animals is unethical and killing / mistreating plants is perfectly fine holds much philosophical merit. — Tzeentch

Maybe not so much philosophical but biological for sure. Plants have totally different survival strategy, they are "built" to be eaten by animals, and then they just grow back the part that was eaten. Or maybe the animals eat flowers, fruits etc. that are even more meant to be eaten. Biologically, plants and animals are different in this sense. Plants are more like the "lab meat" of scifi visions of future.

As for me, I've been mostly vegan for many years. My "philosophical" argument is very thin, I just don't feel good about eating my fellow living and breathing creatures. So I don't eat them.

I don't know which diet is best for the climate, and I don't believe I have the resources or competence to really understand these complex issues. So I'm happy that other people are doing it. If it turns out that my way of living is a disaster for the environment, then I'll probably change something.

Why is that "the dark side", may I ask?

Or does it correspond to reality because our observed physical reality seems to follow some level of consistency as well? — Paulm12

Maybe our reason is mathematical, or logical by nature, and we just observe what we can, and that's why the particular reality as it appears to us behaves consistently. Thus, the reason is circular in a way that we find what our brain can find, we understand the universe the way our brain work. To me it looks like this tells nothing about the reality outside our subjective understanding.

In the 17th century, we explained the universe as gigantic, mechanistic clockwork, all was backed up with our mathematics and we could verify our theories with measurements. Then we ran into some troubles but fixed that with some more mathematics. Now we can model objects that we cannot see with our ever sophisticated mathematics, and run tests in vast particle accelerator machines, and the universe seems to be happily following along. We just keep on solving anomalies with some more mathematics, and developing more sophisticated models. And all this grows out of basic logic our brain starts to build when we grow up. Me, not-me. Me, mother. One and the Many. What if the reality can be whatever, we just don't know any other way to break it up.

This sounds like Kant, and I'm not very proud of it. I mean it's 2022, I should know better.

I also want to add that Jung also was very scientific and meticulous, but his theories were a bit wild, to put it mildly. Anways, Noll's book is just one POV, although almost strangely hostile one. But I enjoy reading it, and especially its descriptions of the strange spiritual scenery of 19th century Europe.

Libido seems to be used in a very similar fashion than "will" or "spirit" or "creativity", or many other substances of that sort. Driving, creating force behind the scenes.Very typical 19th century scientific thinking. Psychoananalysis was indeed scientific back in the days, but we need to understand that the world was something totally different.

I just read Richard Noll's book Aryan Christ, and it opens up very interesting POV to the early years of psychoanalysis. In that account, Freud appears to be very much of scientific type, but Jung is something else.