As the writer of the OP, I officially declare that we no longer have to use the umlaut when referring to Rodl. — J

Starting with human intelligence, an answer is that it is a psychological construct — frank

Arguably, the question of the meaning of being is the question par excellence of all philosophy. — Wayfarer

if we deny to AI conversational assistants the ascription of genuine emotions or autonomous drives, that must be, it seems to me, mainly on account of their lack of embodiment (and social embedding as persons in a community) rather than some missing (literally or metaphorically) "inner" ingredient. — Pierre-Normand

Feel free to credit me in spirit (or as a friendly AI collaborator!) and best of luck with the discussion—it sounds like an engaging and thought-provoking thread! :smile:

All these comparisons suggest (and those of 1967a, pp. 23-24; 1962, p. xxiv; 1984, pp. 363, 369; 1967b, p. 354, 359 explicitly state) that numbers, functions, and thought contents are independent of thinkers "in the same way" that physical objects are.

Abstractions can't exist in the phenomenal world, and therefore anything we discover about them is a discovery about our world, the subjective and/or World 3 world? Or neither . . . Everything else you and Burge say about Frege seems correct, and definitely the focus of Rödl's challenge. — J

. For what it's worth, my current opinion is that we lack a good account of how to reach a so-called view from nowhere, but our entire philosophical enterprise rests on the need for one. — J

The picture of grasping is very well suited to elucidate the matter. If I grasp a pencil, many different events take place in my body... but the pencil exists independently of them. And it is essential for grasping that something be there which is grasped... In the same way, that which we grasp with the mind also exists independently of this activity... and it is neither identical with the totality of these events nor created by it as a part of our own mental life. — Tyler Burge, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, p639

I guess that invites the question: how do humans develop an autonomous will? Do they? — frank

That sounds like a rehash of data they came across rather than an intelligent exploration of the question. Achievement: yes. Intelligence: no.

But that doesn't mean they can't cross over into intelligence, which would be characterized by learning and adapting in order to solve a problem. — frank

"Don't rely on any experts, scientists, NASA photographs -- prove yourself that the earth is round," what do you do? — flannel jesus

It will only think when it becomes a self-organizing system which can produce and change its own norms. No machine can do that, since the very nature of being a machine is to have its norms constructed by a human. — Joshs

Hinton's argument is basically that AI is sentient because they think like we do. People may object to this by saying animals have subjective experience and AI's don't, but this is wrong. People don't have subjective experiences.

When we say we've experienced X, we're saying that the world would have to be in state X in order for our perceptual systems to be functioning properly. This is what language use about experience means.

For more, in this video, Hinton briefly explains large language models, how AI's learn to speak, and why AI's will probably take over the world. — frank

I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. (Mark Twain) — Bob Ross

am curious if you meant to link to Gerson's article rather than Wang's with the same title. — Paine

The only way for him to be correct, is if he is indeed the reincarnation of Hegel, in a literal sense. — Arcane Sandwich

there's a short review of Self-Consciousness & Objectivity there — J

For Thomism matter is inscrutable and form is intelligible, and reality is a combination of the two. — Leontiskos

The article says:

Metaphysical realism is not the same as scientific realism — Paine

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.” ...

...Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.

That part of the soul, then, which we call mind (by mind I mean that part by which the soul thinks and forms judgements) has no actual existence until it thinks. — De Anima, 429a 16, translated by W.S Hett

Maybe I will get Rödl’s book and find out what he makes of these texts. — Paine

This World is not Conclusion
By Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond
Invisible, as Music
But positive, as Sound
It beckons, and it baffles
Philosophy, don't know
And through a Riddle, at the last
Sagacity, must go
To guess it, puzzles scholars
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies
Blushes, if any see
Plucks at a twig of Evidence
And asks a Vane, the way
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit
Strong Hallelujahs roll
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul

So I share your concern about "wisdom," and I'm not even convinced that anything I do here will have much effect in that regard. — Leontiskos

I have deep reservations about Analytic philosophy, but it's difficult for me to put my finger on a precise critique. — Leontiskos

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

...Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom.

What I know is that science works and built the world — Darkneos

Do you think this is possible? — Ayush Jain

I suppose I would want to understand the nemesis here a bit more clearly. What does this "mind-independence" mean, and who are its proponents? — Leontiskos

According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do. Unless this is so, metaphysical realists argue, none of our beliefs about our world could be objectively true since true beliefs tell us how things are and beliefs are objective when true or false independently of what anyone might think. — Metaphysical Realism, SEP

Depending on how you define idealism, Aquinas could be an idealist. — Leontiskos

The Aristotelian-Thomistic account... sidesteps indirect realism/phenomenalism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes. It claims that we directly know reality because we are formally one with it. Our cognitive powers are enformed by the very same forms as their objects, yet these forms are not what we know, but the means by which we know extra-mental objects. We know things by receiving the forms of them in an immaterial way, and this reception is the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the knowing powers. — Cognition - identify/conformity

I don't have any reason to believe that Kant is responding to Frege. — Leontiskos