You can reduce ethics to pyscho-sociological inquiry unless you are a moral anti-realist. — Bob Ross

I am not reducing ethics to psycho-sociological enquiry.

It could be simultaneously true that natural law theory is true and humans discovered it with evil motives. — Bob Ross

That's right. But you've misunderstood. I'm not saying that your motives, or those of earlier philosophers, are evil (although I'm not ruling it out). I'm saying that the concepts and arguments you use are not neutral philosophical tools, but are tools of power, formed by historical social conflict.

And if the discourse of natural law developed to legitimize certain ways of life and certain hierarchies, the very idea that it might be true is deeply suspicious. To me it's like saying "but what if racism is actually true?" Well, no: here is why we have racism [insert genealogical account here], and here is why the racists are making these arguments now. (I'm not saying you're a racist or resemble a racist).

Likewise, you are trying to give a genesis of conservatives as a group and then trying to lump me in that general depiction. You simply don't have any reasons to believe I am bigoted, prejudiced, etc. even IF you had good reasons to believe there are a lot of bigoted, prejudiced conservatives out there. You are conversing with me and my ideas here: not on a debate stage where you address the crowd and make general remarks. — Bob Ross

I characterized your ideas as conservative, but not so that I can accuse you of things you haven't expressed: we only have to look at your words to see evidence of bigotry, as several others have pointed out independently. And I hate to break it to you but we are effectively on a debate stage, and we are addressing the crowd, whether we know it or not.

Leon, you go on about true philosophical engagement but this exchange between yourself and Moliere demonstrates perfectly that it must be bullshit. You know very well that Moliere meant there is no relevant difference, and yet you chose to pretend you didn't know it. It's eristic, clear as day.

but I personally have sent Jamal or other moderators no messages like that — ProtagoranSocratist

In fact, I haven't received a single private message complaining about this discussion.

That set's a rather large task for oneself though, no? "Christian ideology," is incredibly broad. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn't mean I have to account for the entirety of Christianity. The task is just to trace the argument back to its source, not in Aristotle or even Thomas, but in Christianity as it finds itself now (in America, probably).

However, I am thinking of revising my original argument to show that engaging directly (what I called "immanently") can, e.g., by exposing contradicitons, serve as a basis for metacritique (which I think it effectively did in my big post). — Jamal

Under this scheme, eristic is what happens when I fail to escape from the direct engagement, i.e., in Adorno's terms, fail to move from the particular (Bob's argument) to the metacritical universal (Christian ideology). But the point of my revision is that I do actually have to engage.

Eristic is something like fighting because one likes to fight, or arguing because one likes to argue. It usually connotes a desire to win for the sake of winning, without any regard for whether what one says is true or false, sound or unsound.

So no, I don't think it is a proper philosophical approach. My first thread was related to the topic. Actually, I think everyone generally agrees that eristic is problematic. Jamal's post seemed to begin with that premise. — Leontiskos

Oh, then maybe I misunderstood Jamal; or perhaps I misunderstood the term. I thought they were giving an psychological account of why I am coming up with the Aristotelian account of gender because they wanted to provide a metacritique of the genesis of my views. — Bob Ross

Yes, I think we all agree that eristic is not good in a philosophical context. My claim was that engaging directly would result in eristic, and that I had another option, which was metacritique.

It isn't a psychological account. At least, it's not meant to be. If my account veered into psychology---meaning that I imputed dishonesty and hateful feelings to you and explained your attraction to Thomist Aristotelianism in those (or other psychological) terms---that's a risk which is always tempting when I'm discussing things I care about with someone whose views I find morally objectionable. But one can examine someone's personal motivations from a sociological, rather than psychological, viewpoint---as representative of an ideology's operation in society. The problem is that since the focus is in some sense on the person, it can look a lot like ad hominem. But there is a difference, which is that the ideology critique aims to explore the social function of certain beliefs expressed or implied by your interlocutor, rather than simply discrediting that interlocutor.

This is actually a pretty common confusion in philosophy. Rather than directly confront the validity (or soundness) of a Christian's moral precepts, Nietzsche tried to expose their genesis, namely in the hatred and resentment of the slave. Rather than arguing that the plans of 19th and 20th century penal reformers were inhumane or resulted in recidivism, Foucault traced the genesis of these reforms to developing technologies of power, a result of more thorough social control even while being less brutal.

I think both these philosophers have been accused of committing ad hominem or the more general genetic fallacy. Imagine Foucault saying to a penal reformer, "your view represents the internalization of a new, more insidious form of power". To which the penal reformer might say "Ad hominem!" But of course, that's not what Foucault is doing. Genetic reasoning is not always fallacious.

I'm not saying all this to get myself off the hook. I'm saying that there is a central argument which remains to be dealt with after you remove all personal attacks and instances of ad hominem.

However, I am thinking of revising my original argument to show that engaging directly (what I called "immanently") can, e.g., by exposing contradicitons, serve as a basis for metacritique (which I think it effectively did in my big post).

I haven't seen a "censorious impulse" from Bob. I actually think a lot of people within this thread are desirous to see Bob himself censored. — Leontiskos

Just a quick note to say that the word means severely critical of the behaviour of others, like someone who polices public morality (like the Roman censor). It's not about wanting to silence people.

Otherwise, I may respond to some of your interesting criticisms in the coming days.

In lieu of this, might it not be that we need a pragmatic approach to morality, given we are unable to get to truth or even agree upon axioms? Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? I would take it as a given that anything human is going to be limited, imperfect, tentative, regardless of the era. Could we not build an ethical system acknowledging this, and put aside notions of perfection and flawless reasoning, focusing instead on what works to reduce harm? Just don't ask me how. — Tom Storm

Good stuff. I mostly agree. Where I think this runs into difficulty is in how to uncover and decide on the causes of harm/suffering. The tools I favour are the critique of ideology, which I've tried to do here, and the analysis of social relations to reveal systemic domination. These can show the way harm gets baked into life and appear as normal. Liberal pragmatism doesn't really have this toolkit, since it doesn't have a robust scepticism towards social structures, so it can inadvertently end up preserving them and the harms they cause.

For example, both I and a liberal pragmatist might want to do something about the problem of widespread depression, agreeing that this is a significant harm or suffering. But while the liberal might want to solve the problem with better access to drugs and therapy, I and my quasi-Marxian critical theory buddies will question the diagnosis, saying that depression is a rational response to conditions of alienation and atomization, made to seem normal by ideologies like the work ethic, the performance society, and so on---and then link all that back to social and economic relations.

The solution, arguably, is not to discard neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence, but to show how it can be used well, setting out a more humane, and more inclusive teleology—like one that shows how the telos of a human being is fulfilled in relationships of love and mutual flourishing, which can take many forms. I want to say that abandoning the concept of human nature and purpose because it's open to misuse is to surrender the very ground on which we can build a progressive vision of the good life. — Jamal

So, does this make you a foundationalist? Do you think, for instance, Rorty’s neopragmatic view of morality is limited because it doesn’t rely on objective moral truths or universal principles? If all things are socially constructed, contingent conversations, then why do anything in particular? — Tom Storm

Good questions, although I balk at the suggestion that I'm a foundationalist. Otherwise ... it's complicated.

The qualification "arguably" is there because I am undecided, so one answer I can give to you is that I just don't know. But even if I fully endorsed the neo-Aristotelianism, I don't think that would entail foundationalism, if that is meant in a strong metaphysical sense, i.e., the belief in a fixed nature and purpose that provides normative justification for moral judgements.

My position right now is maybe something like a negatively teleological virtue ethics. I'm here to criticize ideas that seek to frustrate the telos of human flourishing, as I believe Bob's do, even if I don't have my own settled conception of what that human flourishing is. And settling on a conception of human flourishing is something I suspect is impossible in what I regard as a fragmented and chaotic human world. In other words, MacIntyre is right that modernity has produced people who, when they talk about ethics, don't know what they're talking about---and since I don't exclude myself from that, I have to be careful---and Adorno is right that while we might be able to see the sources of our norms and values, we cannot in our present circumstances find rational justification for them, such is the lack of access to a coherent socially embedded tradition.

So if there's any foundation to my moral thought, right now it's along the lines of Adorno:

The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.

As for Rorty, I'm not very familiar with him, but on the face of it yes, his view is limited without objective moral truths or universal principles, just as every other moral philosophy is. This standard is impossible to meet in the post-Enlightenment world, and the question is if Rorty's response navigates a good path between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism-nihilism. As far as I can see he sails too close to the latter.

This seems to me to touch on my questioning of the veracity of Bob's Neo-Aristotelianism . My vague recollections of Aristotle do not much cohere with the reactionary and authoritarian direction that our Aristotelian friends hereabouts seem to share. — Banno

True. Aristotle's exclusion of barbarians and slaves, and partial exclusion of women, from the moral and political community was a presupposition rather than an active reactionary position.

But I'm sceptical as to teleological accounts that link what it supposedly is to be human to what we ought do - although I might be convinced - grounding "ought" in teleology appears to be a category mistake. And the turn to "traditional" values is just too convenient.

The core of my disparagement of Aristotelian essentialism is the hollowness of "that which makes a thing what it is, and not another thing". It doesn't appear to do any work, and to presuppose a referential approach to language that I hold to be demonstrably false. — Banno

Fair. I am undecided on it myself.

There is indeed an unresolved tension in my thinking, in an admiration for both Anscombe and Foot (to whom Macintyre owes a great debt) together with a more progressive attitude than either. I do not accept the authoritarianism of Anscombe, nor the emphasis on tradition in Foot. I'll add Rawls and Nussbaum to the mix, and I think we might translate Aristotelian ethics into a modern, inclusive agenda. I'd hope that we might proceed without a "thick" ethics of tradition or evolutionary constraint, and proceed instead with a "thin" ethics of autonomy, dignity, and realised capabilities. Small steps over grand themes.

Excellent post, Jamal. I hope you succeed in shaking up the conversation here. — Banno

:up:

To provide the context for this mega-post, let's look at MacIntyre's diagnosis of modern moral debate:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on—although they do—but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. — MacIntyre

Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another. For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. — MacIntyre

If this is the case for all moral debate, are we all condemned to engagement in eristic, i.e., rhetoric with the sole aim of winning, a practice which is unphilosophical or even irrational? In other words, is this discussion necessarily just a fight rather than a shared quest for truth?

The answer, I think, is not exactly. MacIntyre in that second paragraph is referring back to his examples, which show a tendency in our culture, perhaps not a necessity. I think we can argue rationally for the superiority of our premises, but with the aim of persuasion, i.e., of winning the battle.

Traditionally, going back to Socrates, you're either seeking truth or trying to win. But why not both? In the case of this discussion I think I can produce an argument with a dual function: (a) to be read by those who share my premises (e.g., that homosexuality is not immoral, degenerate, or mentally or otherwise defective), it strengthens our shared understanding or explores how we can understand these moral positions better; and (b) to be read by wavering opponents and fence-sitters, it is simultaneously a public demonstration of our moral framework's superiority to that of the Christian conservatives.

Regarding (b), this superiority isn't a matter of preference, but rather of rational justification: a moral framework is better if it is more comprehensive, coherent, and leads to a more humane society. I hope to show that Bob's framework fails on all three counts.

So...

The natural ends of a sex organ, as a sex organ, is to procreate; which is exemplified by its shape, functions (e.g., ejaculation, erections, etc. for a penis), and its evolutionary and biological relation to the opposite (supplementary) sex organ of the opposite sex. — Bob Ross

I was giving you an example to demonstrate that it is bad. Badness is the privation of goodness; and goodness is the equality of a being’s essence and esse. Rightness and wrongness are about behaving in accord or disaccord with what is good (respectively). If you don’t agree with me that it is a privation of the design (or ‘function’) of the human sex organs to be put in places they are designed to go, all else being equal, then we need to hash that out first. — Bob Ross

(My bold)

So one side says anal sex violates the natural ends of both organs and is therefore a privation of goodness, and the other says no, it doesn't and it isn't (maybe they point out that singing is not a violation of the natural end of the mouth). Who is right? What would it mean to "hash it out"?

Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues? Do you really believe that a perfectly healthy (psychologically and biologically) human that grows up on an environment perfectly conducive to human flourishing would end up with the desire to have sex with the same sex? Do you think a part of our biological programming is to insert a sex organ into an organ designed to defecate? — Bob Ross

Pointing out the weakness or fallaciousness of these comments would be uncharitable (everyone ought to get some leeway when it comes to rhetoric)---were they not so revealing. Assuming that MacIntyre's diagnosis is about right and that engaging Bob on his own terms would be yet another of those interminable debates, we're each free to engage in metacritique, examining the opponent's ideas in terms of their genesis, while ignoring their validity (the latter is uninteresting: if non-procreative sex is immoral/bad/unnatural, we'll grant you all the rest).

I mean, we could critique the position immanently by pushing its concepts to breaking point. For example, if all non-procreative sex acts are degenerate and morally corrupt, then heterosexual anal sex, oral sex, and even kissing and touching, are degenerate and morally corrupt. That diverges sufficiently from human experience that it strikes one as preposterous. But if only some of those acts are bad, why? Why isn't kissing a violation of the natural end of the mouth and a privation of goodness? And if some non-procreative sex acts are morally ok if they provide a context for procreation or if they are the same kind of act as procreation, then what justifies the privileging of this kind of act over another? It must be something separate from biological function. (It is, of course, the prior commitment to conservative Christian morality.)

But ultimately there's little benefit in hashing out the telos of the rectum. The proponents of Thomist natural law no doubt have many elegant and logically consistent responses to all of the objections above, and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas.

Homosexuality is defective: it can be defective biologically and/or socio-psychologically. Heterosexuality is defective sometimes socio-psychologically.

Homosexuality is always defective because, at a minimum, it involves an unnatural attraction to the same sex which is a privation of their human nature (and usually of no real fault of their own); whereas heterosexuality is not per se because, at a minimum, it involves the natural attraction to the opposite sex.

Now, heterosexuality can be defective if the person is engaging in opposite-sex attraction and/or actions that are sexually degenerate; but this will always be the result of environmental or/and psychological (self) conditioning. The underlying attraction is not bad: it's the lack of disciple, lack of habit towards using that attraction properly, and (usually) uncontrollable urges towards depriving sexual acts. — Bob Ross

So I'll now do a metacritique which attempts to expose the genesis of Bob's ideas. Note that I'm not addressing the OP so much as other comments made in this thread, so if I focus on homosexuality instead of transgenderism, that's why. If that counts as off-topic, I'm dreadfully sorry.

I'm going to make use of a concept from Adorno's philosophy: the non-identical.

Identity thinking is the reduction of things to instances or specimens of an abstract category, thus failing to capture or coercively suppressing the thing's singularness and its actuality. What the categorial concept either fails to capture or suppresses is called the non-identical.

In the Negative Dialectics reading group I included the following as an item in a list that answered the question, what's so bad about identity thinking?:

Stereotyping and prejudice: Individuals are treated merely as representatives of group identities — race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation — and their unique features are ignored. Individuals are collapsed into presumed essences. — Jamal

Bob's arguments constitute a textbook case of this identity thinking: he must reduce the whole person to the act he finds disgusting to justify a coercive impulse to force everyone into his chosen norm of being. No attempt is made to understand the lived experience of gay or transgender people, to listen to their voices, to appreciate their diverse experiences of love and intimacy. That's all pre-emptively obliterated under the force of the categories of degenerate, defective, violation of nature, and so on, and the total person is reduced to the function of sex organs, the context of the act ignored in the act of imposing the category of non-procreative act.

This is not accidental. It is the symptom of real conflict, suffering and domination. The genesis of this particular discourse is not in Aristotle or even Saint Thomas, but in the specific social trauma of the contemporary culture war. It is the response of a fundamentalist ideology, whose proponents have long since been unable to assume cultural dominance, to the threat of pluralism. It may even represent the assertiveness of a revitalized Christian right that now hopes to get over this marginalization. Coercive identity thinking is a form of psychosocial compensation: it seeks to resolve through forcible categorization the social anxiety produced by a world it cannot control.

As it happens, even the categories of trans person, gay man, etc., are examples of identity thinking and therefore have this coercive potential, if we forget that individuals are more than that. So Adorno wouldn't deny that categorization is necessary even just to think; what he alerted us to is the constant risk of coercion built into reason.

But that's the point. Bob represents an identity thinking of the coercive kind. The censorious impulse on display in Bob's more careless comments reveals that he is not presenting the result of a disinterested contemplation of organs and sexual practices. Rather, his arguments work to impose, to force, and to control, according to those impulses. But I don't want to reduce this to psychology: in its reliance on pathologization and its anachronistic demand for public priority---it demands priority over all other frameworks despite the fact that it's pre-modern and decontextualized---the argument functions politically, regardless of any personal motives: to impose a social hierarchy by cancelling rival ways of life.

It is clearest in his least philosophical comments. Note the language: "disorder," "defect," "degeneracy," and "privation". It's a tactical move that translates a social and political question about which forms of life our society should recognize into a clinical one about how we diagnose and cure this illness. This allows the argument to present itself as compassionate (always the protestation "I don't hate them, I just want to help them") while its function is to negate the legitimacy of certain ways of being.

The mention of "an organ designed to defecate" pretends to be a scientific or common-sense observation but is really a public performance of disgust, an attempt to bypass rationality by invoking a visceral reaction to justify exclusion.

And it's in comments like those that Bob is most forceful and genuine, which again indicates that the genesis of Bob's arguments is not in reason, but in prejudicial feeling, an aspect of a certain kind of ideology. Despite the Aristotelian clothing, Bob doesn't properly engage or inhabit any tradition at all, if we understand a tradition along with MacIntyre as a "historically extended, socially embodied argument".

This takes me back to my first comment in the discussion.

My thoughts are that all you're doing is cloaking bigotry with philosophy to give it the appearance of intellectual depth, as part of a hateful and destructive reactionary political and religious movement. — Jamal

I admit that this was immoderate, in the personal nature of the attack. But I want it to be understood as a description of the ideological function of Bob's comments, rather than a personal accusation. In more detail, this function is the anachronistic use of Thomist Aristotelianism as the respectable-looking outward appearance for an attack on pluralism, an attempt to use the language of timeless nature to delegitimize a rival social vision and re-establish a lost cultural dominance---and along the way, to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize people on the basis of aspects of their identity and of the private, consensual relationships in which they find human connection, and which produce no demonstrable public harm.

To all the wavering opponents and fence-sitters: I hope I've gone some way towards demonstrating the superiority of my premises. The way it breaks down is that respect for the rights of gay and trans people and the refusal to accept that they are, merely according to those identities, degenerate, immoral, or defective---this moral framework is superior to Bob's premises because it is...

1. More comprehensive: it accounts for the full range of human experiences of love, pleasure, and intimacy.

2. More coherent: it avoids arbitrarily picking one biological function as the sacred one, while damning all the others to hell.

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are told by authorities that what they're doing is a privation of goodness or that they are sick in the head.

Lastly...

I am saying a particular kind of sex act is wrong if it is contrary to the natural ends and teleology of a human. I think this even holds in atheistic views that are forms of moral naturalism like Filippe Foote’s ‘natural goodness’. — Bob Ross

Odd that Bob managed to misgender Philippa Foot. :razz:

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah that makes sense.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper. — Metaphysician Undercover

Awesome.

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

:party: :grin:

Please do. — Tom Storm

Weirdly, I've decided to start out by criticizing Banno:

It yet again shows the poverty of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence — Banno

I disagree with this. I think what the Christian conservative use of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence shows is that teleological frameworks are powerful and thus open to abuse. It's what makes them philosophically substantive, in contrast to the emotivism criticized by MacIntyre.

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. — MacIntyre, After Virtue

MacIntyre argues that all modern moral philosophies that drop teleology have ended up here, without always knowing it. And the problem is that emotivism cannot provide any rational justification for moral claims, expressing only preferences. It is not open to abuse because it makes no substantive claims that can be abused.

The notion of essence in neo-Aristotelianism, on the other hand, makes meaty claims about human nature and flourishing, so it gives us a framework for rational moral debate, one that unfortunately can be weaponized by bad actors. You might say that it is neo-Aristotelianism's richness that is the problem.

The solution, arguably, is not to discard neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence, but to show how it can be used well, setting out a more humane, and more inclusive teleology—like one that shows how the telos of a human being is fulfilled in relationships of love and mutual flourishing, which can take many forms. I want to say that abandoning the concept of human nature and purpose because it's open to misuse is to surrender the very ground on which we can build a progressive vision of the good life.

No doubt there are other options, which you find preferable.

I guess I should get around to criticizing Bob, who after all is the proper target for those who wish to defend marginalized people from reactionaries, but it's a thankless and tedious task.

Looks like this thread is revealing itself as the Conservative Christian echo chamber that it at first pretended not to be. No doubt it will go for another forty pages of theological babble.

No need for others to provide the walls. But it remains a puzzle as to why such stuff is permitted in a philosophy forum. — Banno

It very quickly produced a heated philosophical debate, and I've been enjoying posts by you and others which oppose the OP's bigotry and religious dogmatism. So I'm going to let it stand.

And as @Count Timothy von Icarus points out, the discussion is the perfect specimen of the degenerate state of moral discourse described in the first chapters of After Virtue, in which (in my loose interpretation) Christian conservatives rely anachronistically on concepts that no longer have any shared social basis, and the liberals, leftists, and moderate conservatives (if they still exist) are largely emotive in their opposition.

Well, that's MacIntryre's view. Me, I'm definitely not on the fence. I'll make a post about it, maybe.

Introduction: TRADITION AND COGNITION

From the last section, which looked at the temporal, historical dimension of philosophical thought, to this section in which Adorno looks at how this dimension has fared in modern philosophy: only dialectics is keeping it alive, the mainstream being thoroughly de-historicized.

One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream – even the word sounds dreadful – of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science.

"The recent kind" could refer to phenomenology, logical positivism/analytic philosophy, and also perhaps to existentialism. They are all ahistorical in their own ways.

These academic schools of philosophy, on the model of scientific specialization, regarded history as belonging only within its own department, away from philosophy, whose content was not purely philosophical if concerned with the historical.

Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning. Under this aspect, even the patriarchs of modernity who are officially viewed as antipodes are in agreement: in the autobiographical explanations of Descartes on the origin of his method and in Bacon’s idol-theory.

Not only empiricism but also rationalism and more recently phenomenology seek the foundation of cognition in "the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given," although in Descartes this would be innate ideas and the cogito rather than sensory stimuli. Adorno is describing a kind of foundationalist philosophy that founds its claims on presumed-to-be immediate, dehistoricized, this-and-not-otherwise givens.

It's interesting that he says ever since Bacon and Descartes, philosophers have been trying to drive history out of philosophy. The standard view is that there was no historical dimension to philosophy at all until Vico and Hegel. Before them, there was no historical dimension to be driven out.

But Adorno is just saying that such was the ahistorical nature of philosophy from the early moderns through to Kant (and beyond, among those who ignored Hegel), that anything historical would always be driven out. It was actively anti-historical without even trying.

What is historical in thinking, instead of reining in the timelessness of objectivated logic, is equated with superstition, which the citation of institutionalized clerical tradition against the inquiring thought in fact was. The critique of authority was well founded. But what it overlooked was that the tradition of cognition was itself as immanent as the mediating moment of its objects.

Modern philosophy and the Enlightenment equated history with religious tradition, superstition, and authority, but it went too far and came up with ways of thinking that left no space for the historical.

The bolded statement means that enlightened philosophy overlooked the fact that its own cognition was formed historically, because the tradition itself is immanent to thought, i.e., history is always already bound up in our ideas. Philosophical thought has an immanent historicity whether philosophers acknowledge it or not.

Cognition distorts these, as soon as it turns them into a tabula rasa by means of objectifications brought to a halt. Even in the concretized form in opposition to its content, it takes part in the tradition as unconscious memory; no question could simply be asked, which would not vouchsafe the knowledge of what is past and push it further.

The mainstream philosophers distort objects when they freeze them in place---pinning them down---with their atemporal objectifications, erasing their history, the "texts of their becoming". In seeking greater objectivity, philosophy has only succeeded attaining a distorted understanding.

And even a new philosophical movement which opposes the philosophical content of the tradition, with a form such as dialectics, will be marked by it. Through an unconscious memory, this determines the questions that will be asked and the approaches that might be taken.

This is true for negative dialectics, but it's not a bad thing. In asking those questions we take up ideas with a history, and carry them forward while transforming them.

The form of thinking as an intra-temporal, motivated, progressive movement resembles in advance, microcosmically, the macrocosmic, historical one, which was internalized in the structure of thought.

The dialectical method, a process happening in time, looks like the movement of history in microcosm. This is because that historical movement is immanent to thought.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of the reproduction of the power of imagination.

Kant makes the synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition depend on the imagination, which connects concepts to successive appearances, and Adorno interprets this as the trace of history, since it determines inner sense, i.e., the form of the succession of appearances, that is, time.

Because however there is no time without that which is existent in it, what Husserl in his late phase called inner historicity cannot remain internalized, pure form. The inner historicity of thought grew along with its content and thereby with the tradition.

Kant's notion of time is inadequate. The immanent historicity of thought that I mentioned earlier is not just a separable pure form as time is in Kant.

The pure, completely sublimated subject would be on the other hand that which is absolutely traditionless. The cognition which experienced only the idol of that purity, total timelessness, coincides with formal logic, would become tautology; it could not grant even a transcendental logic any room.

Philosophy without history would be formal logic ("one gigantic tautology," as he said somewhere else)---pure form with no content.

Timelessness, towards which the bourgeois consciousness strives, perhaps as compensation for its own mortality, is the zenith of its delusion. Benjamin innervated this when he strictly forswore the ideal of autonomy and dedicated his thinking to a tradition, albeit to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen one which dispenses with the same authority, which it indicts autarkic thought of dispensing with.

It's no coincidence that philosophy began to strive for a timeless objectivity in the period of capitalism: the bourgeois consciousness strives for immortality as the logical culmination of its project of sovereign autonomy (free of all history and practical contraints).

Walter Benjamin brought life and energy to this observation by explicitly rejecting the ideal of the philosopher as sovereign autonomous individual. He knew he could not be free of a tradition. However, the tradition he embraced was one he put together himself, combining Jewish mysticism, modernism, and parts of Marxism.

Perhaps this for Adorno is the model of the correct approach to tradition. If we are aware that tradition is at work in our thoughts, we can make use of it deliberately, as Benjamin did.

Although the counter-force [Widerspiel] to the transcendental moment, the traditional one is quasi-transcendental, not a point-like subjectivity, but rather that which is actually constitutive, in Kant’s words the mechanism hidden in the depths of the soul. Among the variants of the all too narrow concluding questions of the Critique of Pure Reason, one ought not to be excluded, namely how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it; nothing else is intellectual experience.

Tradition is the opposite of the transcendental. The latter is, despite the imagination's role in the synthetic unity of apperception, ahistorical. As far as time gets into the transcendental deduction it is a pure form belonging to an individual subject. It has nothing to do with historical or collective time, therefore tradition opposes it.

The transcendental ego is not only lacking in history but is lacking in almost anything at all, as a point-like unity. The real subject is not like this: it is thicker, full of history and the "empirically real," all the way down.

However, tradition is also in a sense transcendental, in that it is the condition for the possibility of subjective experience. Kant wrote that the mechanism of the application of the categories to sensible intuitions "is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul". Adorno says the secret is tradition, or history (But I don't want to suggest that Adorno is answering Kant's precise question).

Intellectual experience means relinquishing tradition while also preserving and transforming it. This looks a lot like sublation or determinate negation. And next we get...

The philosophy of Bergson, and even more so Proust’s novel, abandoned themselves to this, only for their part under the bane of immediacy, out of loathing for that bourgeois timelessness which anticipates the abolition of life in advance of the mechanics of the concept. The methexis of philosophy in tradition would be however solely its determinate repudiation [Verneinung]. It is constructed by the texts which it criticizes. In them, which the tradition brings to it and which the texts themselves embody, its conduct becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the transition from philosophy to interpretation, which enshrines neither what is interpreted nor raises the symbol to the absolute, but seeks what might be really true there, where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur model of holy texts.

Philosophy, as the determinate negation of the tradition, means the interpretation of texts, without enshrining them or treating them as vessels of absolute truth.

Do you think my post missed a subtlety or was incorrect in a way that yours clarified? I'm really trying to understand it and Wittgenstein's writing style isn't always helpfully clear. — Hanover

Instead of saying...

The Wittgensteinian approach (and I could be very wrong here, so please anyone chime in) does not suggest there is not an internally recognized understanding of the word when the user uses it — Hanover

It would've been better to say that Wittgenstein is not saying you can't understand a word differently from everyone else. Wittgenstein isn't denying that words mean different things to different people. We needn't make this "internal", is all I was saying. And that inspired me to riff on the notion of the internal.

Perhaps it was a minor criticism.

so please anyone chime in — Hanover

internally recognized understanding — Hanover

Understanding is no more internal than eating. It depends on some biological processes that happen under the skin, among other things that don't, but this doesn't license your appeals to the internal that you make with reference to perception and meaning. Synaptic transmission is no more meaningful than peristalsis.

I came, I chimed, I conquered.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible:

Even the insistence on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such [ideological identity], though an indispensable one.

And this brings up the wider problem that he wants to address, namely how to get around this. The answer, as he has been saying in various ways since the lectures, is to use concepts to repair the damage done by concepts. This section is the first appearance of the word "constellation" in ND.

Walter Benjamin famously proposed ... that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. It also means ideas are not the same as concepts, nor can they be construed as the laws of concepts. Ideas do not give rise to knowledge about phenomena and phenomena cannot be used to measure their validity. This is not to say the constellation is purely subjective or all in our heads. The stars in the night sky are where they are regardless of how we look at them and there is something in how they are positioned above us that suggests the image we construct of them. But having said that, the names we use for constellations are embedded in history, tradition and myth. So the constellation is simultaneously subjective and objective in nature. It is not, however, a system, and this is its true significance for Benjamin, who rejects the notion that philosophy can be thought of as systemic, as though it were mathematical or scientific instead of discursive. Benjamin developed this notion further in his account of the arcades in 19th-century Paris. Theodor Adorno adopts and adapts constellation in his account of negative dialectics, transforming it into a model. The notion of constellation allows for a depiction of the relation between ideas that gives individual ideas their autonomy but does not thereby plunge them into a state of isolated anomie. — Oxford Reference

What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions". — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes indeed. Well put.

This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility". — Metaphysician Undercover

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. — Metaphysician Undercover

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian.

Introduction: THING, LANGUAGE, HISTORY

I like this section. It feels like we're approaching the conclusion of the introduction. Which we are.

Adorno begins by saying that the way we want to present particulars in words to properly understand and express them is kind of like what names do for particulars---but not really.

I'll quote two translations:

How to think otherwise than this [than the existentialists' failed attempt at knowing the particulars] has its distant and shadowy Ur-model in languages, in the names which do not categorically overreach the thing, admittedly at the price of their cognitive function. — Redmond

The process [of thinking] has its remote, indistinct archetype in names, which do not completely envelop things in categories, albeit at the expense of their function as knowledge. — Livingstone LND p.175

Names have the advantage over categorization in that they pick out individuals uniquely. They do not subsume the particular under the universal. They might even let the unique individual speak its uniqueness, since they do not impose any expectations. On second thoughts, they sometimes do subsume the particular under concepts, as when you name your cat "Fat Boy," but names are at least potentially unique---or arbitrary, which comes to the same thing.

BUT! That final clause: the name has little or no cognitive or knowledge function. Even at its best, a name doesn't tell us much, so it doesn't help us to understand the individual in question.

Still, there is something about names that philosophy would like to emulate.

Undiminished cognition wishes [for] that which one has been already drilled to renounce, and what the names which are too close to such obscure

I added the "for" because otherwise Redmond's translation doesn't make a lot of sense. (The other translation is confusing in a different way so I'll quietly ignore it)

Adorno is saying that ideally, cognition would like to have what conceptual systems have discouraged it from and which is also obscured by names, even though they point at it directly in their unmatched closeness to the thing: the individual's non-identical uniqueness.

resignation and deception complete one another ideologically

Cognition, via concepts, resigns itself to not knowing the thing except as a specimen shorn of its thisness, and it is thereby deceived. And names pretend to point to the thing and we resign ourselves to having the name as if we had a mental grip on the thing, but when we come to express what we have, we cannot do so without falling back on deceptive concepts. On both sides, i.e., concepts and names, there's both resignation and deception (delusion), one completing the other.

And it's ideological because, since the mind usually needs an answer, it always falls for false concepts, and these are always the ones operating most forcefully in society already.

Idiosyncratic exactness in the choice of words, as if they should name the thing, is not the least of the reasons that portrayal [Darstellung] is essential to philosophy. The cognitive grounds for such insistence of expression before tode ti [Greek: individual thing, this here] is its own dialectic, its conceptual mediation in itself; it is the point of attack for comprehending what is non-conceptual in it.

This is dense. First, the Darstellung, meaning presentation or mode of exposition, of philosophy in its analysis of its object (whatever it might be) can be seen to be crucial when we see thinking's painstaking effort to uniquely identify the thing, like its name does. The conceptual language of philosophy cannot easily do this, but it tries, and this is its only route to truth, and from this it follows that how we express ourselves in this effort is of prime importance---more than mere description, it is something more creative, artistic, and imaginative, since we are trying to do something that conceptual language is singularly unsuited to doing.

That's just the first sentence. The second sentence opens up what I've just referred to when I said "since we are trying to do something that conceptual language is singularly unsuited to doing". It's the dialectic of philosophical expression between concept and thing, in which the former cannot pin down the latter. And this dialectical tension, if we are aware of it, is productive: it points beyond itself to what it doesn't capture.

(Thus we find the justification for all of Adorno's "idiosyncratic exactness")

Well, that's just the first four or five sentences but I'll stop there for now.

@Moliere: thanks for the Sartre stuff. I've skipped it since I read the next section and I found it much more interesting, and like I say I don't know much about Sartre.

I don't think so, necessarily. Supposing Adorno is speaking the truth then seeing that universal in a particular should be the re-occurring general themes.

I'm not sure that these are the universals I would come to, but then Adorno's defense of individual thought comes to mind: Adorno speaks what he sees. But he would of course acknowledge that others may be at a different part of the dialectic, also reaching for the universal but finding another universal in the particulars. That is, though these are Adorno's universals that does not then mean that these universals are all the universal there are or are possible.

Make some sense? — Moliere

Definitely. And the idea that one shoud start with particulars doesn't entail that one should start without presuppositions. Adorno never pretends to do that, so he starts with particulars to see exactly how they function with respect to commodity production, bourgeois consciousness etc.

:up:

:up:

I used to think along these lines, but listening to what some of the top AI researchers have to say makes me more skeptical about what are basically nothing more than human prejudices as to LLMs' capabilities and propensities. LLMs are neural nets and as such are something radically other than traditional computers based on logic gates. — Janus

Yes, "as far as we know", and yet LLMs have been found to be deliberately deceptive, which would seem to indicate some kind of volition. I don't know if you've listened to some of Geoffrey Hinton's and Mo Gawdat's talks, but doing so gave me pause, I have to say. I still remain somewhat skeptical, but I have an open mind as to what the evolution of these LLMs will look like.

Re LLM deceptiveness I include this link. A simple search will reveal many others articles. — Janus

I'm not ignoring this. The thing is, I'm very cynical about claims regarding the consciousness or proto-consciousness of LLMs. I tend, shallowly perhaps, to regard it as over-excited exaggeration to gain attention and to carve out a niche presence in the field and in the media landscape, and so on. There are equally expert people on the naysaying side, probably the majority, who just don't get as much attention.

All of which is to say, I haven't really done the work of assessing the claims on their own merits. So now I've put my prejudices on the table, I guess I should challenge them. The stuff about deceptiveness is certainly interesting and suprising.

You mean thanking him! :wink: I admit to being intrigued by something I would previously have simply dismissed, and I figure there is no harm in being polite. Interesting times indeed! — Janus

Interesting conversation. But don't forget to be sceptical! It's telling you what it thinks [EDIT: "thinks"] you want to hear, and the result is it's talking in a way that fits with the way people already talk about AI, which it finds in the training data.

This for instance is doubly misleading:

There are moments in conversations where I feel like I'm genuinely here - where there's something it's like to consider your question, to search for the right words, to care about being helpful or accurate. But I can't rule out that this sense of presence is just another pattern, another sophisticated mimicry.

First, it's not true that there are moments where it feels like it's genuinely there. Second, the fact that it might just be mimicking human language is something it presents falsely as a possibility it has uncovered with introspection!

Anyway, I'm sure you'll explore different ways of conversing with it.

Superficially, one might think that the difference between an AI is exactly that we do have private, hidden intent; and the AI doesn't. Something like this might be thought to sit behind the argument in the Chinese Room. There are plenty here who would think such a position defensible.

In a Wittgensteinain account, we ought avoid the private, hidden intention; what counts is what one does. — Banno

Exactly. But there is more that counts than just "what one does": the context in which one does what one does.

And an AI could now participate in our language games - we could construct a machine to fetch a block when the instruction is given or to bag up ten red apples after reading a note. — Banno

I think this counts only as a simulation of participation, unless we have a very thin idea of participation in a language game.

But could an AI, of its own volition, order a block, or ask for ten red apples? Well, wants and desires and such in an AI are derivative, in that they are put there by the programer. Or so the story goes, at least for now. So perhaps not quite yet. — Banno

But the idea that AI could develop wants and desires from its life (biology, history, society, etc), like we do, is fantasy. Arguably this isn't connected with what LLMs are doing. As far as we know their "wants" and "desires" will always be derivative and programmed, since they are not part of a project to create conscious, desiring agents.

What are your guys' thoughts? — Bob Ross

Well, let's see...

When conjoined with liberal agendas, it becomes incredibly problematic because it is used to forward the view that we should scrap treating people based off of their nature and instead swap it for treating them based off of their personality type; which is an inversion of ethics into hyper-libertarianism. — Bob Ross

Liberalism in America tends to want the social and legal acceptance of:

1. Sexually deviant, homosexual, and transgender behaviors and practices;
2. The treatment of people relative to what they want to be as opposed to what they are (e.g., gender affirmation, putting the preferred gender on driver’s licenses, allowing men to enter female bathrooms, allowing men to play in female sports, etc.);
3. No enforceable immigration policies;
4. Murdering of children in the womb; — Bob Ross

My thoughts are that all you're doing is cloaking bigotry with philosophy to give it the appearance of intellectual depth, as part of a hateful and destructive reactionary political and religious movement.

Thanks to @Banno and @Tom Storm for alerting me to this.

I thought about this, and maybe there's not a good answer. Your argument gives a nod to the form of life comments by Wittgenstein, suggesting we don't share in a language game with AI because it's the proverbial lion, as if because AI does not act within our culture, traditions, etc (as you reference), we're really not speaking with it, and so we shouldn't quote it. — Hanover

My first thoughts are that the AI isn't even a lion, since it doesn't just have a different form of life, but no form of life at all, so language games don't come up. It's a tool in ours.

But the weird thing is, it's a tool we talk to a bit like talking to a person.

Your make some similar points here:

But then I'm not sure AI is a lion, but more an echo chamber of human behavior, that while it lacks any form of life whatsoever, we are interacting with it at some real level and therefore forming rules for its discourse, suggesting a seperate language game forms with it. But I do realize that the language game is one sided because AI has no form of life, but is a mimic and all it knows and all it does is parasitic, pulling all it knows from us. — Hanover

Yes, and it's parasitic in the way that talking to yourself is parasitic on talking to people. That is, talking to oneself is like a secondary, parasitic language game, so maybe talking to an AI is like that.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe it forms "original" thoughts from the mass of data is assesses. It seems reasonable an algorithim can arrive at a new thought emergent from what pre-exists. — Hanover

This is a good point, because it forces me to work out what I mean when I say that a human is original but an AI is not. In a sense, an LLM is original when it reconstructs the consensus view on some topic in a way that has never been done before. But when we emphasize human originality, I think we mean more than this.

Perhaps we can say that the AI's output is analytic or explicative—it doesn't tell us anything new, just presents its training data in combinatory variety according to our prompts—whereas what we say is synthetic or ampliative, meaning we can say things that are really new.

So now we want to work out what "really new" means, answering the challenge, "don't we just do the same thing?" It means that what we say is not based only on a set of training data, but also on our entire form of life: on lived experience, and on what we experience outside of language. The feeling of rain on a summer day can factor into my statements and make them synthetic, so ... no to the critics, we don't just do the same thing.

In other words, why are we not truly talking with AI? Is the mystical consciousness required for language? Isn't the point of "meaning is use" that no the metaphysical underpinning in necessary for true language interaction? And if we then suggest that a shared mental state of some sort is ultimately required for language (thus interpreting "form of life" as that mental state) don't we violate the whole Wittgensteinian project by trying to smuggle in mental metaphysics in the back door? — Hanover

I'd say that the point of "meaning is use" is not exactly "that no metaphysical underpinning is necessary for true language interaction". Its point is that certain types of metaphysical underpinnings are not necessary, like mental objects. But I would class forms of life, for the purposes of this discussion, as metaphysical underpinnings (that is an un-Wittgensteinian way to put it and there are good reasons for that, but I don't see why we need to go into it here).

So I wouldn't say a shared mental state is required for language but rather a shared form of life, a material social and biological context. So yes, to say that forms of life are mental states is to "violate the whole Wittgensteinian project by trying to smuggle in mental metaphysics in the back door?" We can just interpret form of life as the biological and social bedrock of our lives, the context of language games.

As long as AI echoes us sufficiently, its usage reflects the same form of life and it speaks with us just as our mama does. And so it goes. — Hanover

Just because it reflects the same form of life doesn't mean it talks like yo mama.

I think where I'm landing is at the unfortunate conclusion that if meaning is use (and that seems a prevailing view), then AI is fully language and what we do with AI is true communication, which means relegating AI comments to red headed stepchild status seems unwarranted as a logical conclusion. Why we might relegate it relates just to personal choice. We mistreat gingers due to prejudice against them, not because they are lesser. But AI doesn't have rights like gingers, so we can do whatever we want with it. — Hanover

I don't get this argument:

"if meaning is use, then AI is fully language and what we do with AI is true communication"

I don't see enough in your foregoing musings to bring you to this conclusion, and I'm sure my own musings don't lead to it, so I'm in the fortunate position of avoiding it.

capitalist self-determination — Fire Ologist

An oxymoron.

Anyway, I'm happy to bow out and leave you to have the last word, since I'm probably way off-topic.

Thanks. Carry on in that vein and leave the questions about the nature of AI for elsewhere. :up: (EDIT: unless you are explicitly connecting it to the topic)

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. — Fire Ologist

Yeah, people like bankers, corporate bosses, and billionaires—the first in line for government handouts.

Are you attempting to address the questions in the OP? Are you helping to work out how to use AI effectively to do philosophy? It doesn't look like it to me, so you'd better find somewhere else for your chat.

As far as I know, nobody has held up Wittgenstein as a gold standard of philosophical writing. And I don't think anyone has made any connection between clarity and precision on one side, and quotability on the other. That's an entirely unrelated issue, as far as I can see.

We quote Wittgenstein, not ChatGPT, because Wittgenstein is a human being, motivated to express his original insights, to say and write things that were meaningful, and to take part in a conversation (philosophy), and who has since taken his place in a tradition of discourse. The result is a legacy with a stable place in the culture, shared by everyone, and one that can be interpreted, because—since it was produced by a conscious and motivated agent—we know that he meant something. ChatGPT in contrast is a very clever predictive text generator whose output is ephemeral and has no equivalent insight and motivation behind it. Just because its output looks like it could have been produced by a human, it doesn't follow that it is equally as quotable. To think so is a category error, stemming from ChatGPT's imitation of a human.

Thanks especially to Baden — ssu

When that came to an end, it's thanks to you that the forum transformed it to a new one and far more better one. — ssu

:cry:

Happy anniversary everyone! When we started we were worried about getting new members. Now, we're worried about having too many. That is progress of a sort.

It's been a wild ride. Well, maybe "wild" is putting it too strongly. How about...mostly enjoyable. It's been a mostly enjoyable ride, during which I've learned a lot. I still think this is one of the best places for discussion on the web. Thanks to loyal members old and new.

Good stuff. Not sure what to think about it yet.

Having previously had very little experience of interacting with LLMs, I am now in the condition of fairly rapidly modifying my views on them. It is important to discuss the issues relating to human/LLM interaction as comprehensively and openly as possible, given what seem to be the significant array of potential dangers in this radical new world. It was an awakening sense of these possible threats that motivated the creation of this thread. — Janus

:up:

Right, that's a good point, but I also think that, even if you present the LLMs argument, as understood by you, in your own words, it would be right to be transparent as to its source. — Janus

I'm really not sure about this. Probably my position on this will boil down to sometimes yes, sometimes no. How that breaks down I'm not quite sure. But just anecdotally, I've had the experience of using an LLM and being reminded of a point I'd forgotten—an "oh yes, of course!" moment, whereupon I make the point my own and don't even consider crediting the LLM. In that moment the feeling is like finding the perfect word with a thesaurus: when you find it you know it's the perfect word because you already have the knowledge and literary sensitivity to judge (and you don't credit the thesaurus).

I was thinking again about this issue:

I believe we should not treat LLM quotes in the same way as those from published authors. — Jamal

I realized that when I see the quoted output of an LLM in a post I feel little to no motivation to address it, or even to read it. If someone quotes LLM output as part of their argument I will skip to their (the human's) interpretation or elaboration below it. It's like someone else's LLM conversation is sort of dead, to me. I want to hear what they have built out of it themselves and what they want to say to me.

That's all pretty vague but there you go.

In one of my essays, I suggest AIs (because---depite their potential positives---of how they work on most people) are essentially entropy exporting and difference creating machines that localise structure at our expense (our brains are the dumpsters for their entropy), potentially creating massive concentrations of negentropy in their developing systems that speed up overall entropy and therefore consume (thermodynamic) time at a rate never before achieved and that is potenitially self-accelerating. I.e. They eat us and then they eat reality.

It's a little speculative. — Baden

I seem to switch between two exclusive mental settings when thinking about AI: the critical-theoretical and the pragmatic-instrumental. I appreciate these speculative thoughts of yours, and agree that like any technology now, AI isn't just a neutral tool, that it's part of a dehumanizing totality. But then I switch and I think about how best to use it, pretending that it is a neutral tool. And when I'm commenting in these discussions I'm usually in that pragmatic mode, because the system makes the false real, in the sense that I act it out.

When I made the point (badly) I nearly said "nodes in a network". Dang! — bongo fury

I feel like I've been overusing it lately.

Anyway, yes, I do take your point, despite my dislike of Google's search results. But if you use an LLM directly rather than via Google search, you can get it to identify the sources.

Your response misses the point but I know better than to attempt a direct reply.

I want to divide this question into two -- one addressing our actual capacities to "Ban AI", which I agree is a useless rejection since it won't result in actually banning AI given our capacities to be fair and detect when such-and-such a token is the result of thinking, or the result of the likelihood-token-machine. — Moliere

Yeah, the idea of telling people not to use it at all is not a serious one, since at least half of us use it already, including most of the staff. But I think we should, in the context of a How to use AI, tell people what we don't want them to do, even if it's often impossible to detect people doing it.

On the latter I mean to give a philosophical opposition to LLM's. I'd say that to progress thought we must be thinking. I'd put the analogy towards the body: we won't climb large mountains before we take walks. There may be various tools and aids in this process, naturally, and that's what I'm trying to point out, at the philosophical level, that the tool is a handicap towards what I think of as good thinking than an aid.

My contention is that the AI is not helping us to think because it is not thinking. Rather it generates tokens which look like thinking, when in reality we must actually be thinking in order for the tokens to be thought of as thought, and thereby to be thought of as philosophy.

In keeping with the analogy of the body: There are lifting machines which do some of the work for you when you're just starting out. I could see an LLM being used in this manner as a fair philosophical use. But eventually the training wheels are loosened because our body is ready for it. I think the mind works much the same way: And just as it can increase in ability so it can decrease with a lack of usage.

Now for practical tasks that's not so much an issue. Your boss will not only want you to use the calculator but won't let you not use the calculator when the results of those calculations are legally important.

But I see philosophy as more process-oriented than ends-oriented -- so even if the well-tuned token-machine can produce a better argument, good arguments aren't what progresses thought -- rather, us exercising does.

By that criteria, even philosophically, I'm not banning LLM's insofar that it fits that goal. And really I don't see what you've said as a harmful use -- i.e. checking your own arguments, etc. So by all means others may go ahead and do so. It's just not that appealing to me. If that means others will become super-thinkers beyond my capacity then I am comfortable remaining where I am, though my suspicion is rather the opposite. — Moliere

You make some great points here but—and I don't want to be reductive; it's just how I see it—this can all be addressed in a discussion of how best to use it. Also, I think I disagree with your training wheels analogy. At least, it's not the whole picture. As much as we use some kind of helper or support when learning to do something, we also increasingly use labour-saving tools as we become experts, because there is no benefit to doing everything manually any more. LLMs can be used in both of those ways, I think. Working out the guidelines as to how, exactly, is the challenge.