There isn't a problem with the logic. The problem is that the premise isn't saying what it superficially seems to be saying. — Michael

I've agreed that the deductive logic within the OP is valid. I disagree that it's inductively valid. As in your reduction of the argument to:

"if I do not pray then God exists, I do not pray, therefore God exists."

that is deductively correct.

However, "if you do not pray then God exists" is a false statement if treated as a contingency. The reductio, for clarification purposes, was creating an absurdity, as in, "if I don't scream then I will be a billionaire, I do not scream, therefore I am a billionaire."

That is false because everyone knows that my defining characteristics are that I scream and that I am a billionaire.

If you don't produce milk, of what use are your nipples?

They are completely different. The implicit connotation in the OP makes perfect sense. Your parallel is perfect nonsense. Not all parlor tricks are created equal. The parlor trick of the OP is a great deal better than your attempt regarding billionaires. Your argument possesses no plausibility because it is so obviously unsound. You are trying to make yourself a billionaire with specious reasoning. The OP is not praying on the supposition that God does not exist. — Leontiskos

I was trying to clear away the enticing parlor trick that made the OP appear plausible so that the error could be revealed. If it can be shown that the use of the logic within the OP will lead to absurd results in other instances, then that is a valid disproof of the logic within the OP. Such is a reductio ad absurdem.

Logical equivalence is not determined solely by symbolic representation, especially in light of the interpretive choices made when translating from natural language to formal logical symbols. — Benkei

"If A then B" is logically equivalent to "if C then D." You're going to have offer a proof that is not the case without equivocating between deductive and inductive logic. I don't see how that can be done.

Deductive logic ensures that if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. Obviously when the premises are true, a valid deductive conclusion will say something about the world. — Benkei

This offers an equivocation of the term "true." The sylIogism "If A then B, A, therefore B" is true. The statement "I am at work today" is true. It's the analytic/synthetic distinction. It's for that reason why a statement can be deductively true and inductively false, which is what the OP showed. Analytic validity says nothing about synthetic validity.

Your second argument is not inductively supported because the conclusion is supported by the definition of mammal. It's like saying, all bachelors are single, John is single and therefore a bachelor. There's no probability involved that a single man isn't a bachelor. — Benkei

The definition of "mammal" was arrived at a posteriori as opposed to "bachelor" which, as you've used it, (i.e. there is no probability a bachelor can be married) is a purely analytic statement. That is, no amount of searching for the married bachelor will locate one. On the other hand, unless you've reduced all definitions to having a necessary element for them to be applicable (which would be an essentialist approach), the term "mammal" could be applied to a non-milk providing animal, assuming sufficient other attributes were satisfied. This might be the case should a new subspecies be found. For example, all mammals give birth to live young, except the platypus, which lays eggs. That exception is carved out because the users of the term "mammal" had other purposes for that word other than creation of a legalistic analytic term.

"All penguins are black" means something very different as an analytic statement versus a synthetic statement. The former holds it true as a matter of definition. The latter as a matter of fact. Necessary versus contingent.

Another hot button issue as an example, "Can a man give birth?"

So I guess what's the bigger picture? — schopenhauer1

I'd say the main point of the OP was snark, hitting back at those ancient proofs for the existence of God that can't seem to go away. It points out that attempts to bootstrap something from from logic alone lead to whatever foolishness you desire.

No, I don't think so. The OP is nowhere near as "ridiculous" as your argument about billionaires. The English argument of the OP makes sense in a way that you haven't recognized. I don't see that any of this has to do with deduction vs. induction. — Leontiskos

The two arguments (mine and the OP) are logically equivalent under deductive logic. They are represented symbolically the exact same. For one to be more ridiculous than the other means you are using some standard of measure other than deductive logic to measure them, which means you see one as a syllogism and the other as something else.'

Inductive logic references drawing a general conclusion from specific observations and it relates to gathering information about the world, not just simply maintaining the truth value of a sentence. To claim that statement of the OP is more logical than mine means that the conclusion of the OP bears some relationship to reality. If that is the case, it is entirely coincidental.

Deductive logic says nothing at all about the world.

(1) All dogs are cats, all cats are rats, therefore all dogs are rats. That is true, except for the fact that dogs aren't cats and cats aren't rats.

(2) All dogs are mammals and all mammals provide milk to their young; therefore, all dogs provide milk to their young. That is true, both deductively and inductively.

(1) and (2) are represented the exact same way deductively and are therefore both true deductively. (1) is inductively false and (2) is inductively true.

In a syllogism, the premise is a given. In an informal statement, it is a contigency.

That's what the OP plays upon.

Can you have a non-sequitur critique of a structurally valid statement? Does content matter? — schopenhauer1

That was the point of my post. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/939830 . You can say any ridiculous thing you want as long as you treat the statements as meaningless premises that are reducible to symbols. If you treat the premises as contingent statements that have a truth value of their own based upon empirical information or whatever you use to decide if a statement about the world is valid, then you end up with non-sequitur issues, but those non-sequiter issues are not deductive logic fallacies, but are inductive ones.

Deductively, the conclusion of the OP follows. Inductively not. That's the interesting part of the OP.

Why use this trick to find God when you can cash in?

If I am not a billionaire, then it is false that if I scream, my screams will be heard. So I do not scream. Therefore I am a billionaire.

This points out the real problem of the syllogism, which is that the premises in the God example are assumed by the reader to be contingent and not necessary and the truth value of the conclusion is then confused as actually saying something about the world as opposed to it just being a logical application of rules. The way it's structured is that you read the conclusion and forget it's just a tautology.

The "So" in "So I do not pray" is a clever twist, as it suggests the speaker has decided to do something to create God, leading the reader down the intended road that the syllogism means something beyond its logical structure.

But let's assume that a human could be born and be viable even with anencephaly. Well, it's okay to kill it. It has no cognition, no consciousness, no capacity for pain or sense of the world. It's just a beating heart and pumping lungs wrapped in a skeleton, muscles, and skin. — Michael

This seems more akin to the question of when you can pull the plug on a person in a permanent vegetative state. It's not that you can kill the person as in proactively euthanizing it, but you can remove all artificial means of life support and allow it to die naturally. That again is a viability standard and not a consciousness standard. The question being asked is whether it can survive on its own. Of course, should you consider a feeding tube artificial means, it will certainly die if you remove it (and the same being the case for the infant who is no longer offered its mother's milk).

There are also issues related to permanency of one's limitations that are considered. We can withhold life support from a person with severe brain damage because we realize he will never recover. We don't do that for someone who is passed out drunk, despite his consciousness being severly limited. The fetus strikes me as more like the drunk to the extent it will eventually gain consciousness but more like the brain injured to the extent it has no capacity for consciousness in its current physical state.

I tend toward @Bannos analysis to the extent we can look at an embryo and just say it doesn't look enough like an infant that it remains ok to abort it. I move away from that analysis to suggest it's just screamingly obvious and no one should question my criteria because I recongnize that analysis is highly subjective and pragmatic, not really based upon any particular reliable principle.

I also believe the "come on dude, no way you think that thing is a person" is the right's response to the transexual question, substituing "man" or "woman" in for person. You have to consider the implications of your position in how it affects other positions you might hold.

Assuming your source is correct and mine isn't, the problem I still have is that there is no cite to the laws in the various countries referenced that suggests there is a relationship between the abortion laws and when consciousness begins.

For example, in the US, abortion regulations were based upon the viability of the fetus outside the womb and not with consciounsess. If consciousness and viability happened to occur at the same time, that was coincdental.

It would seem that the primary concern of the pro-choice side would be to protect the right to choose. As long as the deadline (so to speak) is sufficient to offer an opportunity for consideration and action, I would think the objective is preserved. That is, if a woman is aware of her pregnancy in the first trimester, the choice for abortion need not wait until the second when it starts becoming more difficult to distinguish the fetus from a person.

As mentioned in an earlier comment to you, the evidence suggests that thalamocortical connectivity is required, which occurs ~24 weeks after conception, and so I support abortion up to around that point. — Michael

This says:

"Functional connectivity between thalamus and cortex develops rapidly between 30- and 40-weeks’ gestational age and has been shown to be disrupted in preterm infants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7859832/#:~:text=Functional%20connectivity%20between%20thalamus%20and,et%20al.%2C%202015).

40 weeks is 9.2 months. That's a pretty lenient standard.

What is innocence, and why is it very important to society and law? — Shawn

The presumption of innocence in the law describes the burden of proof, placing it entirely upon the state in proving the crime was committed. That is, the accused sits in the chair prior to the evidence being submitted as being considered fully innocent, and the prosecutor must then prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, with the accused having no burden and having the right not to present any evidence and to remain silent if he so chooses.

That has nothing really to do with actual innocence like when a young innocent man loses his virginity to a seductress with golden flowing hair, a gentle smile, and ever so secret plans for the future.

An alternate legal system that assumes the accused guilty and then places the burden on the state to prove innocence might be more humane, as it would impose upon the people the duty to find the accused's excuses as opposed to proving him wrong, which is just to say there is more than one way to skin a cat, if skinning cats is what you do.

What I aim at is a better understanding why I am not happy with my own progress, which I won't ask others to diagnose; but, perhaps see if what I am saying might be true — Shawn

You don't want to care, but not only do you care, you care that you care. You see the problem, right? You can't want to not care, else you care about not caring and your goal was to not care at all. But alas, you can't embark on the mission to not care unless you care about not caring.

Your problem is that you care. Until you don't care about not caring you can't fix that, but wanting to fix it is part of your problem because it shows you care.

It's a hopeless circle, so you must give up hope to cure your hopelessness because hope is a symptom of caring

Give up hope so that you won't be hopeless? How could that make sense? You must not care that you don't care if you don't want to care. but you can't not care if you care to eliminate your caring.

I don't know. Maybe you're stuck living among the living, forced to face each day with joy or sorrow, dealing with the emotions of being human. Take comfort in the fact that that sounds infinitely better than what you were seeking.

Since you must care, embrace it and realize those pangs of caring are unavoidable. That is, acceptance of your feelings seems more realistic than trying to quash them.

I agree that in my post and yours we have chosen obviously different images, but the point made is that the visual distinctions don't play a role in whether they are designated rights. Visual similarity is not what determines rights

They are not the same. — Banno

What is their important distinction for the purposes of claiming one has rights and the other doesn't.

You would agree these are different:



picture share

Yet they both have the same rights.

Why?

Not all sorities can be resolved in this way, certainly. But this one can, and I knew it would be example — AmadeusD

If you'd steelman the position, we could avoid these diversions.

So I have a heap of rice consisting of 10,000,000 grains. Which grain makes it not a heap?

As far as the abortion debate goes in this analogy, all that is necessary is that we acknowledge that there is some amount that is not a heap (X), some amount that there is a heap ( Y) and some amount where we are uncertain (Z). Abortion would be permissible in X, not in Y, and we can be as cautious or as reckless in Z as our values might might be.

So it's not exactly the case that we ought not kill them because they are a person, but that they are a person and we ought not kill them because they have thoughts and feelings and wants and so on. — Michael

The moral claim is that persons are sacred, endowed with certain rights. The claim would be, to the moral realist, that in this reality, persons have those rights.

There are also people as well. The claim is that within reality, there are people walking around.

Ergo, don't murder the people.

But denying essentialism does not deny that there are people or that every example of a person is ambiguous and might not be a person. Denying essentialism only means there is no one element that every person has, but instead perhaps that there are a number of criteria that if existing within certain combinations will result in a person.

So it's not that entity X with attributes a, d, l, and q ought not be killed. It's that if entity X has the attributes that satisify what a person is then entity X should not be killed.

I do follow what you're saying, and maybe we're not saying anything terribly different, but you seem to be saying that "Person" is shorthand for saying "entity X with attributes a, d, l, and q," so we needn't elevate the term "Person" to mean something more or different. My view though is that entity Y with attributes a, d, l, and c and not q might also be a "Person," so it serves an important function to place entities X and Y into the "Person" catagorization because in our moral universe, People have special rights.

I'll again point out that the interests and preferences of the person carrying are much more apparent than those of the zygot or cyst or foetus. We do not need an agreed definition of personhood in order to understand that while the mother can tell us what she wants, the conceptus' needs are only ever inferred. They are not of equal standing. — Banno

That logic doesn't work because it would support infanticide. The obligations imposed upon parents to support their children are real whether the child is in utero or not and an infant's wants can only be inferred as well.

That is, there is no basis for treating some people as second class citizens if they are indeed people. What is a "person" is a either based upon empirically based observations or it's socially constructed. As has been argued in the transsexual related threads, the argument from the left was pretty solidly that what is a man or woman is a social construct and from there we create laws that protect those socially created classifications.

In truth, I think the left does the same with regard to what a person is, although there seems to be this struggle to try to support it with science. It's not going to be supportable in science though because the essence of personhood is far too nebulous a concept.

That is, let's leave to the right the hard and fast rules: A man is XY and a person is the product of conception. Let's leave to the left the social constructs: A man is a person who so declares himself to be and a person is who society declares them to be. Your basis for not protecting certain fetuses seems wrapped up in protecting certain societal interests consistent with your views on protecting women. That's not a bad thing, but I don't think it needs to be further supported by ad hoc arguments related to science where we try to prove through a microscope that a fetus isn't a person.

Angelic sounds from the heavens.

A good point, but then resemblance is not a sufficient criterion either, since a dead human body still resembles a person pretty exactly but isn't a person. — Echarmion

It depends upon what you mean by "resemblance." At first glance sure, but after a while I start to notice differences between a dead guy and and an alive guy.

But as to a sperm affixed to an egg, that doesn't look like any person I know.

Beyond that we do afford rights to human beings whose ability to behave as a person has been temporarily or permanently damaged to some extent. I think this can be easily accommodated as being out of an abundance of caution, which seems a reasonable strategy to adopt. — Echarmion

The most cautious approach is to afford rights at conception. That would be a really safe approach, but if you think women have rights worth protecting, then the safest approach for them would be to protect the right to abortion up until the moment of birth. Then you have to balance the interests, and once you do that, you're not talking about science, but you're talking about public policy that satisifies the most people.

But the problem is that the ideologues control the debate, not the pragmatists, which is why the respective sides spend the better part of their arguing screaming "misogynist" and "murderer" at each other.

It is unambiguously not a person, not a human being with memories, needs, and preferences. — Banno

But there are organisms, unambiguously people, who lack these attributes as well.

I don't afford embryos the rights of a person because they don't look like people. They look like a dividing cell under a microscope. I could pretend it's more than that, but it's not. An unconscious amnesiac is a person if he resembles those I know to be people.

I don't think it was a violation. P1 says something about 'whatever begins to exist', but a claim that God didn't begin to exist expiicitly exempts itself from P1. — noAxioms

If "whatever" doesn't mean everything, but only something, then the conclusion:

Therefore, the universe has a cause for its beginning — MoK

does not follow.

That is, if you can ad hoc remove those things you don't want to have a beginning, you can remove the universe as well.

You can't say everything has a cause, so therefore the universe must have had an uncaused cause. The statement is self-contradictory.

If God can always have existed without a cause, then so can have the universe.

They claim that God didn't begin to exist but exists. — MoK

They can't claim that because it violates premise #1, which was my point.

Premise #1 is:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its beginning — MoK

By all means, may 'merca have a sane ethical and political discussion, without divine intervention. — Banno

American abortion law was fairly progressive prior to Roe's reversal. Anchoring the law in convoluted Constitutional interpretation left it vulnerable. It's now been thrown back to the states and the democratic debate that was stunted for 50 years has been reopened. We're in a time of transition, but i think we'll eventually get it right. Hard decisions are supposed to be messy.

Murder is unlawful killing. It's not murder if abortion is legal. — Banno

If infanticide were legal, it wouldn't be murder. Substitute anything for the word "infanticide" and the logic holds. "Murder" entails illegality.

The pro-life folks are essentialists. That element worth protecting in you or me they believe exists in fertilized eggs. I don't find that position despicable. I just find it unpersuasive. The conceptus and I surely look distinct in all important ways, but I'm not terribly offended by the insistence that we ought not have fuzzy lines distinguishing which humans are afforded protection under the law and which not.

But turning away from essentialism, if we look instead toward general resemblance, we don't get a fully satisfactory answer either. Why would a 5 week fetus be a person and not the 3 week fetus?

And what does women's choice or viability have to do with any of this? I'd have no problem with heroic efforts to save an organism that was unquestionably a person even if it weren't at the moment viable and even if the person carrying it objected. Viability and choice arguments are pragmatic political insertions, but they ignore the question of personhoid.

And the point is that this isn't philosophy when we all are doing is trying to arrive at workable or even compassionate public policy. It's just political debate, and therefore the vitriol.

Let's talk about the law of Hanoveria that says "Thou shalt not break cups." We can then argue whether a hunk of clay on a turning wheel can be destroyed prior to its full formation. That subtracts the vitriol.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its beginning — MoK

This premise is self-contradictory.

If what you mean by "whatever begins to exist" is that there are certain whatevers that "begin" in a creation ex nihilo sort of way, i.e. something from nothing, then you've violated the other condition of this premise, which is that every whatever "has a cause."

That is, you are saying in a single breath that some things just come to be without a cause but all things have a cause.

This contradiction becomes more evident when you seek to locate the elusive first uncaused cause (i.e. God). That is, this argument doesn't lead you to finding God, but it leads you to realizing that even God fails to meet your conditions because God is a whatever that must also have a cause because you told me everything has a cause.

The error is in the logic. Premise one is necessarily false. For there to be an uncaused cause, you must state that some whatevers are not caused, which would then allow for the universe to be one of those whatevers.

What impresses me about the commentary is its recognition of the misplacement of events, suggesting an understanding of the way things should be in ordinary life despite it not having lived life at all. It also recognized insensitivity, which suggests the machine is sensitive. I also thought its recognition of satire showed it wasn't committed to literalism. It read intent over direct meaning.

The main thing to note is that we've added valuable and relevant human content to this thread, thus shaming ChatGPT into silence. — Baden

Possibly, but ChatGPT's analysis of my comments is pretty dead on:

"This piece seems to blend absurdist humor with social commentary, though it can come off as jarring due to its provocative imagery and themes. The mix of surreal elements, like crying girls in construction work and eating cats, creates a bizarre narrative that challenges conventional logic. It seems to critique attitudes toward marginalized groups while using hyperbole to draw attention to societal issues.

However, the tone and content may be off-putting to some readers due to its casual treatment of sensitive subjects. If the intent is humor, it might benefit from a clearer structure or more context to avoid misinterpretation. Overall, it has potential, but it walks a fine line between satire and insensitivity. What are your thoughts on it?"

Thank you for your blog about Cyprus. I never knew there was so much dust there. Construction work can certainly be noisy and inconvenient during a holiday. B+ — Baden

You're not from the US, so you don't know this, but crying girls do most of our construction work in their underwear. It's been a real problem, so we started sending them to Cyprus because few, if any of us, care where that is. Once they go to Cyprus, they're not allowed to return because they eat our cats. If they're super hot though, P Diddy gets them over for his parties because he likes the freaky deaky stuff.

Now that's he's in full lock down, they're talking about building a wall to keep them out, but no wall's keeping America's wrecking ball sweetheart from crashing through.

Thank you for your short story about Henry and his toy train. I will never forget it. C+. — Baden

It's like the wrecking ball saw dynamite and believed itself to be obsolete, but then Miley Cyrus straddled it naked and it mattered again.

My analogy really brings the point home that just because you're currently being relegated to the dust bin due to your intellect being hopelessly deficient in comparison to what even the most rudimentary AI programs offer, if you hang in there, you too may be repurposed.

Just hang in there brother. Hang in there.

"Now the man that invented the steam drill
Thought he was mighty fine
But John Henry made fifteen feet
The steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord
The steam drill only made nine

John Henry hammered in the mountains
His hammer was striking fire
But he worked so hard, he broke his poor heart
He laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord
He laid down his hammer and he died

. . .

They took John Henry to the graveyard
And they buried him in the sand
And every locomotive comes a-roaring by
Says "There lies a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord
There lies a steel-driving man"

Well every Monday morning
When the bluebirds begin to sing
You can hear John Henry a mile or more
You can hear John Henry's hammer ring, Lord, Lord
You can hear John Henry's hammer ring."

It will make things up entirely, but it's 2024. My guess is in a few years, it'll be smarter than all of us. Except me.

But we're not permitted to kill the unconscious, so that must not be the basis for deciding if someone is a person.
— Hanover

If a child is brain dead and being kept alive on life support, the parents can decide to harvest the organs and remove life support. This society puts a lot of emphasis on the (supposed) personhood-brain connection. — RogueAI

I'm not sure of the distinction between brain dead and dead dead. But as to consciousness, you can be unconscious and have brain activity, like when you're asleep.

"haha, I'll keep acting unethically and reap the benefits of unethical behaviour".

Thank you for your irrelevant opinion. — Benkei

You don't provide any basis for why the acheivment of your objectives would be a more ethical way to run an economy. Looking at your worth criterion for example, it might be entirely obvious to you that a nurse ought make more than a professional athlete because nurses are more important than athletes, but it isn't to me. What is obvious to me is that we need nurses to acheive certain societal objectives, and the current system provides those nurses. If your system results in thousands of nurses and no athletes, I don't follow what ethical objective you acheived, other than to glut the market with the people you think are the best sorts of people.

To the extent you're now taxing the public by over supplying nurses and eliminating those folks you don't have as much regard for, that seems not only inefficient, but immoral in itself in that you're depriving people of resources just to promote those you like better than others. If there weren't enough nurses, I'd be in favor of figuring out a way to increase their numbers, but that's not what you're trying to acheive. You're just say nurses are worth more, so they get more.

The problem with your theory is that it isn't an economic theory at all, but it's a simplistic promotion of what you think are good values. At some point, market forces have to control this system or else you end up with too many nurses, and I'd suspect you're going to start having to select nurses on merit, but "merit" isn't identified in your trinity of values. Like it or not, people are going to choose professions based upon income received and so they'll look at your list of good folks and choose accordingly.

Your theory strikes me as a contemporary sort of Marxism, with the need element being directly from Marx and then the just production being a save the planet sort of ethics du jour element.

This is all to say if you want to create an economic theory, you have to look at what the consequences of that system will be. A car that doesn't run isn't worth having even if it was the most ethically produced car of all time. If your system causes economic collapse, it's hard to argue that was an ethical system.

Does it matter if our ethically designed economy results in starvation and invasion by Darwinstic nations?

I mean somewhere we have to guage it by its productivity and security..

But yes, please implement these ideas in your country. By taking yourself out of the competition, I get more. I'm not going to stop running my race because you've found the whole running thing beneath you.

Georgia Property and Liability Insurance Law, 2024 ed.

subsidiary argument which may not have been mentioned is, "Any species which develops systematic means to kill 70+ million of its own fetuses each year is messed up." A species which so buttresses the killing of its own offspring is not in good shape. For a species to intentionally kill its own fetuses is exceedingly unnatural. — Leontiskos

What makes abortion unnatural? Murder is an inherent part of humanity, particularly the murder of our own family members. Cain killed Abel after all, and there were only 4 people in all of creation at the time.

But despite our murderous tendencies, with domestic violence, wars, pollution, and even counting abortion, human populations continue to grow.

All is natural.

Argue ethics. That makes more sense.

Good points. But I'm wondering. We can say therr are just killings of people. For example, it's not murder when we execute a convicted murderer. Or when we kill in self-defence. But what is an example of a just killing of a fetus? When it puts the pregnant woman's life in danger seems like an obvious example. Any others? — Patterner

In a legalistic setting (as opposed to a philosophical one), the questions of when the taking of a life is justified and when it is not is just spelled out in whatever law you pass. That is, I can take a life to save my own, or another, or even to protect my dwelling. There need not be any underlying principle guiding any of this, but just whatever legislatures want to do.

So, if abortion is declared illegal in a very broad way, you end up with unintended consequences like what happened in Alabama. In vitro fertilization became illegal because the fertilized eggs in test-tubes were considered people because human life began at conception, which means their disposal was murder. You would have to preserve all unused fertilized eggs I guess forever. Maybe you'd have to create a birth certificate with each creation of life and a death certificate with each death and then send that to the department of vital records. That needs to be worked among those in Alabama, but that's the problem of the hard and fast rule that a sperm attached to an egg is a person fully endowed with rights.

Roe v. Wade, like it or not, created a workable solution from a pragmatic perspective and now all of this is opened back up to work out now that it no longer is controlling law.

It's interesting when it becomes more of a challenge to invent a problem than for the AI to solve it. — Christoffer

We're accepting that AI is artificial, which means that it does not go through the same curiousity humans do when they arrive at questions. The question isn't the process by which the program comes up with its questions, but it's whether the question asked is is indistinct from what we arrive at ourselves. We also have to realize that we don't actually know how our curiosity and creativity arises, and it's reasonable to assume a considerable amount comes from what we are taught or learned through just experiencing life.

The way this forum works, for example, is that a poster has a thought he believes philosophically interesting and so he posts it for feedback and discussion. I believe ChatGPT can arrive at good thread topics that would compete agaisnt what we see from real live posters.

I asked ChatGPT for an original topic to post here and it asked:

"If consciousness is the lens through which we experience reality, does altering this lens—through technology or substances—mean we are experiencing a different reality, or merely a different perception of the same reality?"

This question would pass muster on this Board and it would spark conversation. It is as well presented as anything else we see here and provokes questions above reality and direct and indirect realism. In terms of comparing this question to what the general non-philosophical public might consider, I'd suspect that it is more complex than the vast majority of people could arrive at.

We also have to keep in mind that the free version of ChatGPT is not the most sophisticated AI product on the market and not one specifically focused on philosophy, which means better questions and answers could be created.

My view is that AI advances will result in greater disparity between the higher and lower intellects. With chess, for example, the world didn't become filled with equally matched players, all who had the answers at the ends of their fingertips. The world became filled with higher chess performers who learned to utlize the programs to advance themselves. It's like if you and I worked with Einstein and you spent your days picking his brain and asking him every question you had about physics and I just avoided him because he was quirky and boring, you'd come out much smarter than me. Making information available helps only those with the curiosity to look at it.