Now that I am reading Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, it would help if you cited where you are quoting from. — Paine

I read the Schopenhauer passage as not confirming the Rödl statement. Was that your understanding as well? — Paine

It must be an error to suppose that thought, in order to be objective, must be of something other than itself — Sebastian Rödl

"Fregian proposition". What's that? — Banno

It must be an error to suppose that thought, in order to be objective, must be of something other than itself — Sebastian Rödl

All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But ...all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and active in time. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I always read PhS as sort of suggesting, like Aristotle, that Absolute Knowing is more a sort of a virtue— — Count Timothy von Icarus

if eudomonia consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [νοῦς], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already that this activity is the activity of contemplation. — source

Then your use of "mental event" is quite broad. — Banno

The parasympathetic nervous system controls salivation. Is salivation then to be thought of as a mental event? — Banno

Are there other mental events that are not thoughts? — Banno

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