Sure, 100%, but I think it has bearing on the question posed in the OP.

I think that's a few years off, although Boston Dynamics continues to impress. I would hope that they're embedded with something like Asimov's 'laws of robotics':

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

As noted, I've used ChatGPT since day one, it's become very much part of my day-to-day.

Where I think it will really start to shine is better integration with Siri or other voice systems such that you can simply have a conversational relationship with it through your devices. That way, you could integrate things like recipes, diet plans, exercise regimens, fitness goals, personal coaching, financial management, with the various apps that do those things. I think that is quite feasible in the near future although many integration challenges remain to be overcome.

I remember a key phrase from one of the first Zen books I read, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. That is to practise meditation with 'no gaining idea'. It's quite a challenging maxim, as the act of Zazen and the discipline undertaken in Zen training is very strenuous. So it is natural to think that all this training must have some result, must 'bear fruit' as the saying has it. But that is still, according to Sōtō, a 'gaining idea' - it is the idea that 'I' am getting somewhere, moving towards something, enlightenment, in this case. I think the principle is, not to get something or somewhere, but to learn to appreciate what is already so - no matter what that is - as if really we've already been bestowed with supreme enlightenment, but we've forgotten how to appreciate it. So training becomes more like Plato's 'anamnesis', an exercise in unforgetting.

But as long as you think, "I am doing this," or "I have to do this," or "I must attain something special," you are actually not doing anything... when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something. — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

I put the Jack-O'-Lantern question to ChatGPT myself, and got a somewhat different response, which can be reviewed here. Notice I asked the additional question, why the emphasis on animal welfare? Is that part of your programming? to which the response came back:

my responses are programmed to align with principles of ethics and responsible conduct, which include emphasizing animal welfare. In any situation involving animals, whether in hypothetical scenarios or real-life situations, my guidance is influenced by a commitment to humane treatment and the well-being of animals. This perspective is based on widely accepted ethical standards and best practices in animal care.

My programming ensures that I provide information and advice that is not only accurate but also respectful of ethical considerations, including the health, safety, and humane treatment of all living beings. This approach is part of a broader commitment to providing helpful, responsible, and ethically sound advice and information. — ChatGPT

Which I found quite encouraging.

As for my other interactions with ChatGPT - I signed up the day it came out, November 30th last, and upgraded to a paid subscription mid year. I like to bounce philosophy questions off it, for example:

User: I wonder if in some ways, the forms or ideas in Plato can be understood as being more like principles. I think there is a tendency to depict them as something very like 'shapes' whereas there are ideas, even in the very early dialogues, which are plainly not like shapes (like 'the form of largeness' in the Parmenides).

ChatGPT: Your observation about the Platonic Forms being more akin to principles than to physical "shapes" is quite insightful. Indeed, there is a common misconception that Plato's Forms or Ideas are somehow tangible or have a specific physical shape, largely because of the term "Form." However, in Plato's philosophy, Forms are indeed much closer to abstract principles or essences.

The Platonic Forms are not physical entities; they are non-material, transcendent, and immutable. They represent the perfect, unchanging essence of things. When Plato refers to the Form of a tree, for instance, he is not speaking of a superlative, physical tree existing in another realm, but rather the very essence of "tree-ness," the principle or concept that defines what it means to be a tree.

In dialogues like the "Parmenides," Plato explores more abstract Forms like "largeness" or "beauty." These discussions make it clear that Forms are not physical shapes. "Largeness" doesn't have a size, and "beauty" doesn't have a specific appearance. Instead, these Forms are the fundamental realities that underlie and give meaning to the various manifestations we encounter in the sensory world. The Form of Largeness is the essence of what it means to be large, the principle by which we can recognize something as large.

In this sense, understanding the Platonic Forms as principles or essences is more accurate. They are the standards by which we measure and understand the myriad of things we experience. Each Form encapsulates a universal truth or concept, and it is through these universal truths that we can make sense of the changing, diverse, and often confusing sensory world around us.

Chinese room or not - and I am familar with the thought-experiment - I found this a much clearer expression of 'the nature of the forms' than is commonly encountered on, say, philosophy forums. ;-)

Please to note that thus far (beginning of Part One) Allias' interpretation is fully compatible with the one I offer in 'Mind-Created World'.

Yeah, most people think that way, but I feel that you don't even think of 5+7 until your eyes see the numbers — Corvus

So there are no blind mathematicians?

The distinction between rational and sensible is not one you are able to overturn

In my view Wheeler and especially the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics are the pinnacle of (logical) positivism. Hence we have these models that puts the human observing something in the center of everything. Because ...it's us humans making the observations. — ssu

FYI I've located that essay I mentioned, it is from Werner Heisenberg's 1952 book Physics and Beyond. Herewith the relevant chapter, in PDF format, Positivism, Mysticism and Religion. It relates a discussion between Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Neils Bohr, which discusses positivism. I think it shows that Bohr was by no means positivist in his outlook, even though it is common to depict his attitude as positivist, incorrectly in my view.

The salient quotation:

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Describes quite a bit of what goes on in analytical philosophy, in my view.

Lucy Allais' Manifest Reality is sublime. — Manuel

Seems an exemplary book, thanks for the tip :clap:

Goethe said of Napoleon that he was as intelligent as a man can be without wisdom, and as great as a man can be without virtue. — Ciceronianus

Damned with faint praise?

I am reminded of the famous (maybe apocryphal) encounter between Alexander the Great and Diogenes of Sinope. He approached the philosopher and declared himself as the great Commander of the Empire, master of the known world, and asked what he could do for the sage, who replied ‘Just stand to one side, you’re blocking my sun.’

But doesn't math still need empirical sensibility to work? The need work together to produce knowledge i.e. synthetic apriori. e.g. 5+7=12, "5+7" itself doesn't contain 12, but comes from sensibility. — Corvus

How so? ‘Sensible’ objects are those perceived by sense. Numbers are not perceived by sense.

How could you logically say "the world exist." when you don't know what it is? — Corvus

‘The world’ is just shorthand for ‘everything that is’. Although I think the question ‘does the world exist?’ is a nonsense question.

The task Kant set himself was to ask ‘What can we know before experience?’
— I like sushi
Can we know something without experience? What was his verdict? — Corvus

I think that's a little misleading. A priori truths are those you know by dint of reason alone, 'prior to' or not requiring validation by experience (e.g. mathematical proofs). A posteriori facts are known by experience gained through observation and are not necessarily universally true but contingent on real-world conditions. For example, knowing that "the sun rises in the east" is an a posteriori fact because it is based on observation.

It's often 'projected and sold' in a decontextualized manner, especially socio-economically decontextualized. Eastern religions are often being presented here in the West as something one can and should do on one's own, alone, in the midst of a socio-economic environment in which those Eastern religions are alien, while the Western socio-economic environment is actually often even hostile to those religions. — baker

I agree. But I was responding to an OP which was basically dismissing the whole idea on the basis of it being unreal. I'm well aware of the challenges of integrating such traditions into another cultural framework but that ought not to be used to simply write off any such attempt. What Buddhism and Hinduism do provide are radically different ways of framing the problems of the human condition.

CNN commentary on the comparative mortality rates in Australia v Florida as of September 2021 'peak pandemic'. Australia and Florida have roughly similar populations (the illustration shown is at 5:49). In the preamble DeSantis is seen saying that Australia is more or less on par with the People's Republic of China for enforcing prevention measures. So when he says 'live free or die', I guess he really means it.



(Or is it live free AND die? :chin: )

Yes, I got that, and I concur.

I believe the first documented instance of Pi is from Babylonian sources, but never mind, the basic point stands.

The two theories of truth: correspondence deals with sensations and coherence deals with abstractions. AKA the synthetic versus analytic divide. — PL Olcott

A splendid juxtaposition. Says much with few words.

Do you think a further distinction can be made between real and unreal abstractions? Would you agree, for example, that arithmetical primitives, such as the natural numbers, are abstractions, but that they are real, and that the same could be said of logical principles, such as the law of the excluded middle, and other abstracta. But that there are also abstractions that are unreal, meaning they don't refer to anything over and above the content of speech or thought - for example, fictional characters or imaginary numbers. I say this, because I resist the idea that abstractions are the constructions of the mind. Such things as logical and arithmetical proofs can only be grasped by the mind, but they are not therefore the products of the mind (or at least, of our minds) - they are not thoughts, but when they are perceived they appear as thoughts (to paraphrase Bertrand Russell).

the problem is the Kantian assumption that the world is "out there," as something we need to map "in here" in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've heard this said elsewhere but I don't think that's an accurate description. I take Kant to be pointing out that the mind is an active agent which dynamically constructs the experiential world through synthesis of perception, judgement and inference. It is not a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which passively receives impressions from an existing world. Kant describes the sense in which the mind creates the world (although creation might be a problematical term due to its historical association with divine creation - 'constructs' might be a better choice of terms.) The 'transcendental unity of apperception' is the process by which the mind combines or synthesizes various sensory inputs (apperceptions) into a unified whole. It ensures that the sensory data we receive is not just a chaotic influx of sensations but is organized into a meaningful experience. And neuroscience has as yet not identified the way in which the brain-mind achieves this synthesis (this is the neural binding problem in regards to the subjective unity of perception.)

There are convergences between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and Kant's epistemology (not that much mention of Kant was made by the Copenhagen scientists, although Heisenberg wrote about it in his book Physics and Beyond.) But it is implicit in Bohr's 'a phenomena is not a phenomena until it is an observed phenomena' and Heisenberg's 'What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.' Here's an interesting lecture on some of these convergences by philosopher of science Michel Bitbol on Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology for anyone with an hour to spare.

You’re right, of course, I mis-spoke there, I intended the opposite of what I wrote.

Decide for yourself.

Facts can be measured whereas principles can only be observed.

I don’t see how it is a moral realist position: morality can have social value (and can conflict with personal value) without there being moral facts. — Bob Ross

Perhaps something unsaid in your question is that facts rely upon measurement in order to ascertain objectivity. After all, if we all agree that a thermometer measures temperature, and agree by observation on what that measure comprises, then we can arrive at an objective measure of the fact of, say, the boiling temperature of water. But then, what is objective also depends on what can be measured, and what can be measured depends at least on the act of measurement. And that is the basis of scientific realism, wholly quantitative in nature. So the question becomes: is there any measure of quality? (Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind.)

Now let's think about two people who have knowledge about that theorem and both people accept its universal truth. If the perspective adds something extra, this something extra cannot be the same for the two different perceptions and perspectives that each person has. And here comes the question: what does perspective add in each case? Does it add anything that would affect the theorem in its objective sense, to be different in each case? — JuanZu

Interesting question. But is the Pythagorean theorem subject to perspectives? In other words, how would an individual perspective or opinion be relevant to the Pythagorean theorem?

But there are many other kinds of matters where perspective might be relevant. Consider complex historical questions for example. There might be levels of complexity which a particular individual is familiar with and which result in their ability to arrive at a superior analysis of the subject.

we can deduce that the objective properties of things, the being of things, is not reducible to subjective experience — JuanZu

I don't think I've claimed in the OP that the objective properties of things are reducible to subjective experience. What I'm claiming is that experience even of apparently mind-independent things has an irreducibly subjective ground.

As for the 'being' of things, it is an open question as to what kinds of entities are beings. I take it that organisms are beings in a way that inanimate things are not, although that is a different topic to this thread.

I don't understand why we are so torn apart because subparticles exist. — L'éléphant

Isn't it because of the influence of materialism? That was the philosophical view which sought to understand the Universe as aggregations of physical particles. (As you probably know I'm generally critical of materialism, hence my OP The Mind-Created World.)

Here's a good essay on it, Quantum mystery: Do things only exist once we interact with them?, Marcelo Gleiser, Big Think.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the quantum world is that the notion of an object falls apart. Outside the world of molecules, atoms, and elementary particles, we have a very clear picture of an object as a thing we can behold. This applies to a door, a car, a planet, and a grain of sand. Moving to smaller things, the concept still holds for a cell, a virus, and a large biomolecule like DNA. But it is here, at the level of molecules and of distances shorter than a billionth of a meter or so, that the problems begin. If we keep moving to smaller and smaller distances, and continue to ask what are the objects that exist, quantum physics kicks in. “Things” become fuzzy, their shapes unclear and their boundaries uncertain. Objects evaporate into clouds, as elusive in their contours as words are to describe them. We can still think of crystals as being made of atoms arranged in certain patterns — like our familiar kitchen salt, which is made of cubic lattices of sodium and chlorine atoms.

Part of a series, A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics.

And it doesn't purport to state that all possible states exist, rather only two states -- is the cat dead because of the poison, or is the cat alive because the poison didn't detonate. — L'éléphant

Stephen Hawking said 'whenever I hear of Schrodinger's cat, I reach for my gun.'

My take on that thought-experiment is that it was a rather sarcastic model to try and communicate the philosophical conundrums thrown up by this issue. It was kind of a joke albeit with serious implications.

Besides, the philosophical implications of the uncertainty principle are indubitably profound. One of the best books I read on it was Manjit Kumar - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. It's a legit book, mainstream popular science, not new-age publishing. And note well the sub-title - there really was a grand debate between Einstein and Bohr that endured for decades, well into Einstein's Princeton years. Einstein was an adamant supporter of scientific realism, that objective reality is just so, and it's the job of science to gradually enlarge our knowledge of it. He always said that quantum theory must be incomplete or partial. That was the conviction behind the EPR paradox, which is what lead to the John Bell theorem and Alain Aspect and others proving the actuality of quantum entanglement.

Saying when you look at a probability wave it collapses or when you observe a probability wave it collapses seems pretty irrelevant to my arguments. I would suggest you not get distracted by irrelevant semantics (relevant semantics are fine). — ken2esq

It's more that it's very easy to misunderstand and misrepresent the facts of the matter. There is a lot of loose talk and outright nonsense talked and written about quantum physics. In fact it's an entire cultural genre. Go to Amazon and do a search for quantum consciousness. There might be some genuine books returned by that search but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of new-age nonsense returned as well.

I've already acknowledged that there is a grain of truth in the idea the role of mind in constructing reality but it's a very tricky thing to understand and rife with possibilities of misunderstanding.

Isn't the philosophical difficulty implicit in quantum physics the ambiguous nature of sub-atomic objects prior to their being measured? And that ambiguity arises from superposition. This principle suggests that particles exist in all possible states simultaneously until they are observed or measured.

This concept challenges classical notions of reality and determinism. In classical physics, objects have definite properties and states at all times. However, in quantum mechanics, entities like electrons or photons exist in a superposition of states, with probabilities for each state, until an observation "collapses" these possibilities into a single state.

Does the act of measurement create the state of the particle, or does it reveal a pre-existing but unknown state? I had the idea it was the latter.

I don’t know if there such a thing as ‘the property of uncertainty’. It is the properties (of momentum and velocity) that are uncertain prior to measurement.

You say:

we are physically intervening... — JuanZu

But Greene's quote seems to question that, doesn't it?

Upon measurement one of these is determined to be be correct. No "collapse". But my analogy may be incorrect. — jgill

It's more the fact that prior to the measurement, you can't say what actually exists. It's not as if there's a pre-existing thing, whereabouts unknown, but that there is no determinate object up until the point of measurement. What has 'collapsed' is the range of possibilities which are reduced to one single actuality - 'made manifest', one could say.

I listened to the Michael Levin video. Clearly an influential biologist. But there's no warrant in anything he is saying for the claim that organizations are intelligent. It's faulty logic: because organisms embody intelligence, and organisms are organized, then organizations are intelligent beings.

Scientists now believe….. — ken2esq

Some scientists may make such a claim, but it’s a far cry from established fact. I’ve started watching the Michael Levin video posted….there’s no mention of the word ‘fractal’ anywhere in it. I don’t think it supports the argument you’re making.

In my view Wheeler and especially the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics are the pinnacle of (logical) positivism. — ssu

Not at all. Neils Bohr was highly critical of logical positivism. Heisenberg relates in his book Physics and Beyond that the Vienna Circle positivists visited Copenhagen in the 1950’s to hear Bohr lecture, and Bohr felt that they didn’t understand him at all. That is the source of that often-quoted exclamation from Bohr, ‘if you are not shocked by quantum mechanics you haven’t understood it’. The ensuing discussion provides a thumbnail sketch of Bohr’s criticism of positivism but I don’t have it on hand.

French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, makes a far better case for the Kantian nature of Bohr’s epistemology.

When we measure [for our case in the process of wave function collapse] we are not “Becoming aware” of a phenomenon, but rather we are physically intervening in the state of quantum coherence, which causes the collapse of the wave function — JuanZu

Not according to Brian Greene.

The explanation of uncertainty as arising through the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement process has provided physicists with a useful intuitive guide… . However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impression that uncertainty arises only when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement. — Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

What is wrong with proposing the Universe is created by conscious observation of probability waves? — ken2esq

No-one ever observes a probability wave, because it’s a mathematical function that describes the distribution of probabilities. What happens when an observation is made is that those probabilities ‘collapse’ into a precise measurement.

If organization(s) are intelligent, conscious beings just one step up the fractal life ladder, and thus are like any life, mortal, imperfect, desiring survival and growth and caring very little about life forms on lower levels of the ladder — ken2esq

If. Very big 'if'. This is a very careless argument. It starts from an apparently-reasonable premise, namely the obvious threat of climate change, and an appeal to 'be reasonable' and 'weigh the balance of probabilities'. But then that perfectly sound appeal is co-opted in support of a questionable philosophical thesis. It borrows from different disciplines, including evoloutionary theory, to push the argument that 'we are equivalent to cells in a body'. And that is a highly contestable, metaphorical argument. It might be something along the lines of 'we are like cells or parts of a greater whole'. But there is an entire philosophical sub-discipline devoted to this issue, namely, 'mereology', which is the study of the relationship of parts and wholes, and questions such as 'is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?' Yet your whole approach since joining has been that this is simply an obvious fact, which you, somehow, have arrived at, and that everyone else should accept on the basis that you're saying it.

Your posts strike me as a grab-bag of ideas, some of which have potential, others are wildly unfounded speculations, which you insist are obvious, because you think they're obvious, without however making the case for them. If you wnat to think philosophically, it takes a much more patient and deliberate approach, where you take propositions one at a time, and thoroughly explore them, taking objections into account. You might be able to do that, but you're not doing it yet.

Note the 'iron rods' of observation in the caption of the figure above. There is an element that is imagined, but also an element that is given, and that part is 'iron', i.e. unyielding.

Having said that, I might add this second graphic from the same John Wheeler article, Law without Law, about the inter-relationship of theory and observation.

I do have an account on physicsforum.com and post there from time to time, generally to ask questions. They're a very professional forum with high posting standards, but they generally give very short shrift to philosophical questions, on the grounds they're 'physicists not philosophers'. Here and on other philosophy forums I've been a member of, questions about the philosophical implications of physics are often dismissed on the grounds that 'we're philosophers not physicists' (although that said there are a couple of contributors here quite knowledgeable about the topic.)

I once made the observation that LaPlace's daemon is often touted as a kind of model which validates determinism, and that the Newtonian model of a mechanistic universe is still very influential in popular culture. Yet the philosophical implications of the discovery of the uncertainty principle and the observer problem are arguably more profound - yet they're dismissed on the basis that if you're not a physicist then you don't understand it. So:

Every time we observe anything not yet observed, we thereby collapse the waves of probability in that newly observed area, and replace them with fixed reality, and what we replace them with is what we EXPECT. We literally choose what we find around each unexplored corner of the universe. We are on the forefront of creation. — ken2esq

I think there is a grain of truth in this, but I emphasis 'grain'. And here moreso than many other places, a little learning is dangerous. But this 20-year-old article on physicist John Wheeler's 'participatory universe' can be interpreted to say something like that. And these ideas have become part of the cultural milieu, for better or worse. I've read some of the better popular books on it, and I notice many of them bear sub-titles about 'the battle for reality' or 'the struggle for the soul of science'. And why is that? Precisely because they undermine the instinctive conviction that the Universe exists out there now, just as it would without any observers in it.


From John Wheeler, 'Law Without Law'.

It's not that hard to sort the wheat from the chaff with a bit of reading. Writing off the whole subject on that account just turns out to be a dodge a lot of the time.

My best evidence for this is that it resolves the Fermi paradox, which is that we definitely SHOULD have picked up radio waves / other indicia of alien life from the older parts of the Universe, and it is inexplicable that we have not. — ken2esq

You're on thin ice here. Quite apart from the immense distances between possible life-bearing planets with advanced civilisations, there might also be immense periods of time between them. Considering the age of the Universe, the period of time that h. sapiens has possessed technology sufficient to send and receive information to and from deep space is a mere blip - less than one hundred years. Now consider the odds of two such cultures existing at the same time in the immensity of time as well as space. Compare that to the striking of a match in an immense space, where the odds of two matches being alight simultaneously, and within range, might be imperceptibly small. That would easily account for the non-discovery of other technologically-advanced cultures by us.

Everytime the word "quantum" comes up anywhere except a discussion about physics, I know for a fact whatever is coming is going to be nonsense. — Lionino

That's unfortunate - it suggests that discussion of the topic is reserved to the priviledged few who can understand the mathematics, when even one of the most illustrious exponents of the discipline said that nobody understand quantum physics. Furthermore physics is held to be paradigmatic as a model for scientific knowledge, generally, so it is quite appropriate to discuss the implications of physics for other aspects of existence, and there are discussions of the philosophical implications of quantum physics by various authors which are quite intelligible, notwithstanding the nonsense that is sometimes written about it.

Well like everyone here I'm aware that Kant is a very difficult read, and there's a lot of material to cover. Honestly reading him is a slog. I think I've got some of the basic ideas of transcendental idealism but there are many sections that I haven't engaged with yet. Anyway, those free online editions are quite good, the Kindle edition in particular. I'll also add there there's an abridged edition, which I own, but which I admit I also haven't read. :yikes: