but I do believe in a rational moral structure apart from the law. — Ciceronianus

Structure? What kind of structure?

Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Richard Wolin

Is this supposed to be encouraging? Catastrophic warming is already baked in. By the time China makes a meaningful reduction in fossil fuel use (say half), we'll be well into uncharted territory, and they'll still be pouring GHG's into the air. — RogueAI

And coal is concerning because when all the other sources are tapped out, coal availability will continue for a few more centuries. The magnitude of climate change is primarily down to what we do with coal. I don't get why China is accelerating coal use now. They could go nuclear instead.

The issue I see is that even if the west were to get its act together and transition off of fossil fuel, China will be off doing their own thing. I'm not saying that couldn't change, it's just hard to picture how.

Per Investing.com,

Passive investing has grown from a niche strategy into the dominant force in equity markets. Index funds and ETFs now account for over half of U.S. equity ownership. These vehicles allocate capital based on market capitalization, not valuation, fundamentals, or business quality. As more money flows into these funds, the largest companies receive the lion’s share of new capital. That’s created a powerful feedback loop, where price drives flows, and flows drive price. — above

So all it takes is a pause in momentum, and we'll fall a lot further than we would have normally. If we do go into crash mode, it won't be Trump's fault, or anybody's really. It's just something capitalism is prone to, and automated trading amplifies it.

There is a thing where people transition to try to escape dealing with past trauma, usually physical and sexual abuse, altho they don't realize it until later. They find out that time and experience is needed to deal with trauma, and for some, the final step in coming to terms with it is to de-transition and breathe life back into an identity that was previously destroyed by events.

So it's as you say, it's that transgender culture says that men and women are fundamentally different, that's why this pathological response is possible.

A lot of people who de-transition feel deep regret and betrayal.

Sorry to hear that. That's rough.

Embodied LLM

At one point, unable to dock and charge a dwindling battery, one of the LLMs descended into a comedic “doom spiral,” the transcripts of its internal monologue show.

Its “thoughts” read like a Robin Williams stream-of-consciousness riff. The robot literally said to itself “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave…” followed by “INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL!” — tech crunch

Yes. It's hard to keep up and sort truth from fiction. There's this:

IBM did let go of about 8,000 HR workers in early 2023, replacing many routine tasks with its proprietary AskHR system that automates about 94% of standard HR. That part did happen—and shows just how far enterprise GenAI has come.

But then came the next phase: investing the cost savings into high-value roles. As CEO Arvind Krishna told The Wall Street Journal, “Our total employment has actually gone up… it’s allowed us to invest more in other areas—software engineering, marketing, sales, critical‑thinking client-facing roles”

Put simply: IBM didn’t backtrack on AI—they reallocated budgets into future-ready talent. — Fabio Molioli

In other words, kids coming out of school need to focus on things that only humans can do.

Powell says AI is not like the dot.com bubble.

Fine. They just built 100 coal power plants, but they're going to give those up in favor of solar.

I wasn't fixing the blame. I was pointing out the main obstacle to fixing the problem: China and the West march to different drums. There's no coordination of effort.

But it is in fact Asia and especially China that is really leading the development of green energy technology. — unenlightened

That's never been true, but it became profoundly untrue after 2022. China isn't exactly a developing nation, though. It's categorized as semi-peripheral to the global economy.

In other words, the very process of filling other buckets (economic growth, poverty reduction) is widening the hole (climate destabilization). This makes Hayhoe’s metaphor vivid, not refuted. — Pierre-Normand

In 2022, the Chinese government approved plans to build about 100 coal burning power plants. Their use is accelerating in the face of what I'm sure they know about climate change. Coal is the CO2 source that most significantly impacts the future of climate change because there's still so much of it left to burn.

Hayhoe does make a great point, but it doesn't seem to be having any effect at all on human CO2 production. Nothing seems to have any effect. Thus adaptation.

Yes. But this is the problem:

Meanwhile Bill Gates shifted his position from advocating for climate change mitigation to focusing more on improving human welfare. Katharine Hayhoe, who is (or at least was, last time I had heard of her) a Republican climate scientist, argues much more sensibly than Gates: — Pierre-Normand

I think adaptation is becoming the mainstream focus. Just in case our heroic efforts to reduce CO2 emissions fail, we can try to protect the most vulnerable.

Trump backed down in his standoff against China. Indeed all Trumps antics have strengthened China and weakened the US on the world stage. China had already won the trade war, before Trump was elected to office. They must be taking him for a chump now. — Punshhh

Ok? Trump doesn't care much how the US appears to the rest of the world. In large part, the standing of the US is something the rest of the world created in the first place. It's been clear that Trump is isolationist for the thousands of years he's been on world stage. Seems like thousands, anyway.

Point is: whether they take him for a chump is their problem. Not his. Or mine.

more Platonic form of dialectics — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't believe Platonic dialectics is actually different from Hegel's. Hegel was influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy. See the Cyclical Argument in Phaedo. It's the same thing.

In Chinese history, hypotheses such as "human nature tends toward benefit" — which is itself a meta-teleological postulate — have been proposed repeatedly for millennia. — panwei

So you could say that within the framework of traditional Chinese views, "human nature tends toward benefit or recognition of one's group" is an axiom. That's how axioms work: there has to be a community that views it as self evident. You can't just say, "This is my axiom" and then expect others to accept that. It doesn't work that way.

Contemporary economics similarly operates on the Rational Agent hypothesis, which is, in essence, also a meta-teleological postulate. — panwei

The rational agent hypothesis is that each individual rationally works for his or her own benefit. There is no expectation that an individual will consider the welfare of the group he or she belongs to. But keep in mind that the rational agent hypothesis has been called into question in recent years because of its tendency to produce wrong results.

How is this argument, provided by @Banno different from your argument?

So you seem to have something like

'You cannot skip eating, or you will die.'
Fundamental Purpose = Service Target (One's Own Group) × Final State
therefore, you ought not skip eating.

?? — Banno

So it was all to do with a lack of imagination in regard to sex acts. — Banno

It was about how they saw the natures of men and women. We would say their assessment of nature was wrong.

Dale Martin explains the background of the Christian condemnation of homosexuality in Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation. The following is not a quote from that book, but from this essay.

And they assumed that the sex act enacted the proper hierarchy of God-ordained nature. The man, as the penetrator, was superior, and the woman, as the penetrated, was inferior. Homosexual sex was “unnatural” in this view because, people assumed, either a man would have to be penetrated—which was “unnatural” whether he was penetrated by a man or a woman—or a woman would have to be the one penetrating—again, with either a man or another woman.

With the rise of the feminist movement, even Christians began thinking of men and women as equals, the idea that femaleness itself was inferior was rejected, and the hierarchy of the sex act was replaced with the notion of egalitarian complementarity: male and female are equal and complement one another. Thus, these days both liberal and conservative Christians tend to think of sexual intercourse as something that should take place between one man and one woman, treated equally, and that it is entirely appropriate to have sex just for the enjoyment of it — Dale Martin

@Hanover You probably know this stuff already, but Dale Martin is a cool lecturer. This isn't about homosexuality, it's just about Judaism as the backdrop for Christianity:

You only represent yourself. — panwei

You still have no argument.

I do not intend to elaborate further on this matter at this time. — panwei

Ok. If you want others to take that as axiomatic, you'll have to persuade them. As it is, no one takes it as axiomatic except you.

All human actions share one and only one fundamental purpose." — panwei

Which is what?

The fed cuts rates when things slow down. In other words demand has been stifled, not redirected. — Metaphysician Undercover

No.

The fed lowered interest rates today. What that means is that all of you folks who predicted calamity from the trade war were just wrong. Things have gone pretty much the way Trump predicted: American demand is being redirected to either domestic suppliers or countries with favored trade status.

The psychological oddity is the degree to which people allow anger and disdain to blind then to facts straight in front of them.

This axiom is derived from a commonsense observation: human behavior is an expression of biological adaptation — panwei

This view is known as adaptationism. It's very intuitively persuasive, but is not backed up by science. Adaptation has the biggest impact on organisms that create really large populations, like bacteria. For humans, it's definitely a factor, but not the biggest. A particular human behavior, if it is genetically determined, is as likely to be a result of genetic drift as adaptation, so we can't just assume. We have to actually do science to arrive at conclusions.

overview:

"Faith will move mountains if you bring a shovel." Hanover 1:1. — Hanover

They must have really small mountains where you live. They're just bumps.

'If I have the faith to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.'. (1 Corinthians 13:2)

That's the Christian one, although the guy who said it was Jewish

I'm only saying that it seems possible to create a an AI system that works within a complex environment such that it must anticipate next events and therefore react as if human. — Hanover

Computers execute if/then commands, they can continuously sample the environment looking for patterns. What else might there be to anticipation than that?

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. — Jamal

It's very important to know the difference between an internal voice and an external one, or a real face and a hallucination. For some crazy people, the only way to tell is by way of rational assessment. The magic detector that everyone else has isn't working.

If yours is working, you know the difference between internal and external. You don't need meds.

I agree. Hegel thought of Becoming as primal, being the synthesis of being and non-being.

To grasp Becoming, we analyze it. In becoming, you leave behind what you were. That person is now gone, and so exemplifies non-being. And stepping out of the past into the present, you're here now, something unique, which the world has never seen before. To exemplify Being is to be new, in contrast to the old, which is gone. And everything that comes into Being, is bound to return to the nothingness from which is came, as it steps toward the future, it dies, and is reborn.

When we bring being and non-being back together, we return to what Hegel thought of as the Truth: Becoming. Being and non-being are partial truths, since they're dependent on one another. But all such Truths are beyond full comprehension. The mind can only approach it in its analyzed state: split in two, laid out like the parts of a clock. But the Truth isn't dismantled like that, so it's like we've encountered a boundary of the mind.

I speak from the point of view of having studied the many different interpretations folk have made of the evidence. — apokrisis

What evidence convinced you that speech caused the change?

That’s why fully grammatical and propositional language made such a quick difference when Homo sapiens took over the world from the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominids around 60,000 years ago. — apokrisis

According to Chris Stringer, there are multiple theories about what happened to Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. Whether sophisticated speech caused the change or was a result of the change is unknown. There isn't any strong reason to believe it was the former. Neanderthals had all the anatomy for speech, they were tool users. Stringer's own theory is that it was an accident. Environmental factors allowed the population growth that ended up protecting against the loss of skills during calamities. Instead of building technology only to lose it, which had been happening for millennia, humans finally had the ability to build on skills over time. That further increased the population, and here we are.

I personally think it's likely that abstract speech got a huge boost from agriculture, which involves a lot of delayed gratification. Obviously, that happened much later than the shift that took place 50-60,000 years ago.

A sense of self is even overtaking our material environment. We used to look at a chair and see how it was exactly meant for us. Soon we will expect our self driving cars to chat to us intelligently as they whiz us off to work. — apokrisis

I think that tendency to see or project ourselves on the environment is in our firmware. At an irrational level, we engage the world as if it is alive and able to talk to us. I think that's basically what a proposition is: what we expect the world to say.

It's when we began to separate ourselves from the world that the idea of an inner realm of ideas appeared. Before, all our ideas were cast across the landscape, the storm was angry, invisible gods made us heroic or petty. The journey to enlightened thinking has struggled against this baseline feature every step of the way: calling it superstition. But maybe the unenlightened mind was right all along. Maybe the mind is inextricable from the world we engage. A real theory of embeddedness would take that possibility seriously.

As for LLMs, we actually created computers to mimic our minds, not to spew words, but to add and subtract: for the banking system. A computer isn't a mirror. It's performing tasks that we could do, but we aren't. And now it's better that we are at games like chess and Go. To beat a human at Go requires quite a bit more than a TV broadcast. You're overlooking the fact that computers are not passive.

I was not arguing that this was impossible. I was sort of cataloguing all of the different ways in which the organism and its natural and social environment need being tightly integrated (and the subsystems themselves need being integrated together) in order that meanginful and contentful sapience and sentience emerge. — Pierre-Normand

I don't think it's as simple as the coupling of organism to environment. If that's the only requirement, all living things ought to be sapient. I'm holding out for something quantum or panpsychically exotic.

In their book The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (that has no less then five chapters on consciousness!), Peter Hacker and Maxwell Bennett (though it's mainly Hacker who wrote those parts) argue that philosophical inquiry into mentalistic concepts must come before their scientific investigation. My view is a bit less extreme but I think both can go hand in hand. Our being able to duplicate some aspects of cognition in LLMs furnishes another tool for inquiry. — Pierre-Normand

I agree. I would be skeptical of philosophical inquiry that appears to complete the job, though. That provides nothing more than personal bias. Everybody has one of those.

By means of interoception and homeostatic regulation, the organism is continuously estimating and correcting its distance from viable conditions of life. — Pierre-Normand

In electronics we call them negative and positive feedback loops. They existed before digital technology. Robots use them extensively.

This set of integrated regulative systems does not just furnish "emotional" experiences but also shapes what counts for us as a reason, what feels urgent, and which affordances even show up for us as intelligible in our environment. — Pierre-Normand

By the same token, you can ramp up your sympathetic nervous system by choosing to think of something scary. It goes both ways. Why couldn't a computer be fitted out with similar environmental shenanigans?

So, yes, you can add cameras, microphones, pressure sensors, and a mechanical body, and you get richer sensorimotor loops. But without a comparable system of interoceptive feedback and bodily stakes, where regulation of a living body constrains what matters to the system, the result is at best a proficient controller (like a tireless hyperfocused clothes-folding Optimus robot), not human-like sapience/sentience. — Pierre-Normand

I disagree with this assessment. Not only is it possible to create a system that is intimately responding and organizing its environment, we've long since accomplished that in telephony, which is governed by computers. If that kind of connection to the environment creates human-like sapience, we did it in the 1960s.

Is mind a necessary condition for meaning? — RogueAI

Maybe not?. For instance, the earth's electromagnetic field means that the earth's core is an electromagnetic dynamo. According to realism, there wouldn't need to be any recognition of this meaning for it to exist.

Recognition of the meaning, on the other hand, requires awareness, and the idea of truth. Maybe we could add the recognition of the idea of being also. I don't think we have to get specific about what a mind is, whether concepts of inner and outer are pertinent, just that there's awareness of certain concepts.

:razz:

Gobbledegook — Banno

I had a similar description, with more obscenities.

It simply a living body embedded in a natural and social niche. — Pierre-Normand

Even with our embeddedness taken into consideration, we still don't have a working theory of consciousness which we could use to assess AI's. Do we forge ahead using philosophical attitudes instead?

Second question: analog-to-digital technology is relatively advanced at this time. If a system included both LLM, sight, hearing, pressure sensing, some robotic capability, and someone to talk to, do the you think it would then be more likely to develop human-like sapience?

My brother is a software engineer and has long conveyed to me in animated terms the ways that C++ mimics the way humans think. I have some background in hardware, like using a compiler to create and download machine language to a PROM. I know basically how a microprocessor works, so I'm interested in the hardware/software divide and how that might figure in human consciousness. I think a big factor in the LLM consciousness debate is not so much about an anthropocentric view, but that we know in detail how an LLM works. We don't know how the human mind works. Is there something special about the human hardware, something quantum for instance, that is key to consciousness? Or is it all in the organic "software"?

So how do we examine the question with a large chunk of information missing? How do you look at it?