The urge to procreate with women is biological, and the fact that it is found in men more than women is not merely a result of gender norms.

But humans are nothing like geometric primitives. Group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities. — hypericin

But if the urge for men to procreate with women is found more in men, and is not merely a result of gender norms, then how can you claim that "group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities"? If that were true then such urges would simply not be found more in men.

To repeat an argument that everyone has avoided:

Suppose we take the male sex and the social role of begetting/impregnating. Begetting is not merely a social role, but it is also a social role. If we say that social roles pertain to gender, and gender is separate from sex, then we would not be able to say that the social role of begetting/impregnating is uniquely performed by males. But that seems entirely incorrect, doesn't it?

And again, the argument is not that every male must perform the act of begetting/impregnating in order to be a male, but rather that begetting/impregnating is a male role which is inaccessible to females, and therefore there do exist social roles restricted by sex. One cannot beget/impregnate without being a male and one cannot become pregnant without being a female. In Aristotelian language we would say that males have the power of begetting/impregnating precisely in virtue of their maleness; precisely in virtue of their sex. — Leontiskos

The fact that males can fertilize ova actually does bear on what individual males do. It means that more males fertilize ova than females (because females can't do it). Contrariwise with pregnancy, more females than males get pregnant (because males cannot get pregnant whereas females can). To deny this, one would need to deny that even though X can do Y and Z cannot do Y, nevertheless an individual X is no more likely to do Y than an individual Z.

Then in an evolutionary or teleological sense, hormonal and strength-based differences between males and females flow, in part, from their procreative natures. A pregnant female is more vulnerable than a non-pregnant human being, and therefore the society which values reproduction must devote more resources to protecting her than it devotes to protecting non-pregnant human beings. It makes sense that males are stronger and tend towards protection given that they are never vulnerable in this way for extended periods of time (because they cannot become pregnant). Once one understands how human beings reproduce, one also understands why males are naturally stronger and more "protection-oriented" than females. Other similar facts follow, such as the fact that the mother who has personally committed a great deal of energy to the pregnancy will be more "attached" to the newborn than the father, and this goes hand in hand with the breast feeding that will sustain the infant's life.

These are a few of the reasons why it is altogether implausible to hold that differences between males and females do not flow out into the social lives of human beings. The sex difference plays a significant role in human life, including human social life. It is also why the position which says that fertilizing ova and becoming pregnant should not "count as" social roles has nothing to be said for it, and has not received any actual defense within this thread.

...argues against pointing to external sources by pointing to an external source... — Banno

But that's not true at all, is it? A post within this thread that you've failed to respond to is not an external source. Your claim that I have pointed to an external source is something we all know to be false.

Remember that it's indeed my view that they should feel alive. — Pierre-Normand

Okay, but look at what you understand even yourself about the logical conclusions:

...and that the traces of that vitality can still be grasped by us as we read and interpret his texts — Pierre-Normand

"Traces of that vitality." An approach that attempts to relativize Plato to his own time and place, such as Wittgenstein's, inevitably falls into the conclusion that a different time and place—such as our own—might still mange to find some "traces of vitality" in that foreign text.

Again, my whole point is that Plato's 2500 year-old text is much more "alive" to us than Wittgenstein's contemporary text, and this helps show why the meta-thesis being applied is incorrect. If a relativizing-thesis were correct, then this couldn't be the case—at least when it comes to texts that are "intended" to be "public."

So, again, the contrast I meant to highlight is between (1) authoring a text (or delivering speech) intentionally directed at an audience that shares a set of communal practices and sensibilities, and (2) the private use of signs in inner monologue as scaffolding for the development of one’s own thoughts. The latter, too, can be alive, and one can jot down such thoughts as notes for personal use. But this kind of "thinking out loud for oneself" is of limited value to others, since it leaves unstated the aims, or stakes, that motivated the private use of signs in this or that way. — Pierre-Normand

I would argue that what is at stake is the idiosyncratic. A private journal is more idiosyncratic than a culturally-relative text, and thus less "alive" to the average reader. But a culturally-relative text is similarly more idiosyncratic than a transcendent text, such as Plato's dialogues. Plato's dialogues are culture-transcending in a way that Wittgenstein simply is not.

My thesis would be that LLMs will never transcend a significant level of idiosyncrasy. They are more on the Wittgenstein side of the spectrum than the Plato side of the spectrum. Concretely, this would mean that the essence of a Platonic text cannot be properly mimicked or patterned by an LLM, which is itself surely a contentious claim. The more general claim is that genius is something that the LLM cannot mimic.

Of course I would have to develop these theses, and at the moment I need to do more background research before continuing in these topics.

In both cases, the problem is that these utterances were never intended to make moves within a public language-game. Their use is more akin to shadowboxing. They are effective and valuable for training, but not comparable to a performance within the ring. — Pierre-Normand

I sort of agree, and recently said something similar:

Maybe you are implying that LLM-appeals would improve the philosophical quality of TPF? Surely LLMs can improve one's own philosophy, but that's different from TPF on my view. I can go lift dumbbells in the gym to train, but I don't bring the dumbbells to the field on game day. One comes to TPF to interact with humans. — Leontiskos

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In both cases, the problem is that these utterances were never intended to make moves within a public language-game. — Pierre-Normand

Nevertheless, this claim is both right and wrong, given the vagueness of what we mean by "public."

The whole issue could also be phrased according to a different light. Scholars like to see Plato as a kind of playwright, carefully sculpting literary texts in order to elicit desirable responses in his readers. This reading is of course very consonant with what an LLM is "doing," but I think it is a deeply mistaken understanding of Plato's work. On my view Plato created something that was beautiful, and it is appreciated because of its beauty. On the opposing view, Plato crafted something that would appease the tastes of the multitude, and his propaganda succeeded because he was skillful. Only by excising the possibility of objective truth or objective beauty or objective goodness can one situate Plato within a relativistic, immanent schema, and it is no coincidence that those who are most fond of LLMs are also most apt to situate Plato in that manner. In the more general context of an artist, we might say that the true artist does not seek to appease those who will view the work, and yet the LLM does seek to appease. That is its whole raison d'être. It is the indifference of the artist that marks the best art, and it is precisely this indifference that the LLM cannot access.

(CC @Count Timothy von Icarus)

No I'm not objecting to that at all. — unenlightened

Okay, I appreciate the correction. :up:

I think provided a much-needed disambiguation of "natural," so I'll leave that issue alone.

So which is it, am I presenting too much, or not enough? — Banno

At no point have you been in danger of presenting too much. Pointing to external sources is not engaging in argument. You simply haven't engaged in argument, such as responding to posts like <this one>.

Here's the guts of it: You and Bob are using an anachronistic ontology in an attempt to defend an immoral position that you actually adopt as a result of your religious convictions, not your philosophical considerations. You are faux philosophers. — Banno

More ad hominem fallacies. More nothing-burgers.

Pointing to the literature is failing it engage? — Banno

You misrepresent because if you failed to do that, it would be more plainly seen how little you have to offer. This is what I said:

Pointing to books or threads is gish gallop and avoidance of engagement. I could equally point you to books or threads demonstrating my own position, but I don't do that because it is a failure to philosophically engage the points being discussed. — Leontiskos

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Yes, my posts contain "oughts". But no, I do not derive those "oughts" from an "is". — Banno

From where do they derive? Surely if you think Ross must demonstrate his meta-ethics within the thread, then you too must be held to the same standard?

We've all had enough moral conversations with you to know that you don't have an answer to the meta-ethical questions you put to others. You always end with something that pretends to be an answer but isn't, like, "It's just what we do."

This is childish sophistry. The mentally ill are, factually, mentally ill. Mere recognition of this carries no pejorative slant. Whereas you, on the basis of a very dubious metaphysics, are diagnosing a group which is not definitionally ill, as mentally ill. As mental illness is universally undesirable, you are saying that membership in this group entails being innately less than the general population. That is just bigotry. Moreover, your "philosophical" conclusions just so happen to coincide with the politically weaponized bigotry against trans people by conservatives in America and elsewhere. — hypericin

There are people of good faith who hold traditional positions when it comes to sexual morality. Refusing to accept this is a form of bigotry. There are enormously robust moral, religious, and philosophical traditions going back millennia which ground traditional sexual morality. Trying to write all of this off in favor of some new theory that popped up a few decades ago will not do. The attitude which treats the vast majority of humans who have ever lived as irretrievably confused and irrational is tiresome. That attitude is leveraged to avoid argument, and it has to stop. If one wants to oppose well-established moral and philosophical positions, then they must use reason and argument to do so.

Regarding the "factuality" of mental illness, such a notion changes quite a bit from age to age, and it changes fastest in our own time. For example, gender dysphoria was "factually" a mental illness until 2018, when all of the sudden it wasn't. Similarly, following the sexual revolution, pedophilia was no longer considered a mental illness in parts of Europe, including places in Germany. The "fact" of mental illness is a faux fact which requires argument, not appeal to authority.

But the idea that the beasts act according to their nature but remain innocent, whereas man has a higher spiritual aspect, and can and should resist his baser animal instincts at times, is really not that absurd in a religious or spiritual account of morality, indeed it is more the standard model, of European traditions. — unenlightened

We definitely agree on this. :up:

My side? Same thing? Can you elaborate a little? — unenlightened

I was trying to get at the underlying way that "moral non-naturalism" is being leveraged within this thread. One can object to a naturalistic meta-ethics, but at the end of the day both sides of these sorts of issues have substantive, 'ought'-involved moral positions that they are upholding. Or put differently, both sides are moral realists, just with a different understanding of morality. For that reason "deep" objections to Ross' moral realism or his 'ought'-commitments involve a double standard. What is needed is rather something like, "I agree with you that there are binding moral 'oughts', but I think you have misidentified them because..."

But perhaps I have misunderstood, and you are not objecting to Ross' moral realism or the simple fact that he has 'ought'-commitments.

Yes, if you did commit to that, you would have to come up with some story about how humans are the exception because they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and thereby fell onto sin from their natural, animal, state of innocence - or some other equivalent. — unenlightened

But your side of the issue does the exact same thing. There are many different issues being discussed in the thread, but I believe this line of yours pertains to homosexuality. Your side of the issue believes something like, "It would be unnatural for someone who is intrinsically homosexual to act as if they are not homosexual, therefore a homosexual ought not act in such a way."

Double standards are being relied upon when folk tell @Bob Ross that his normative claims are inappropriate. Both sides of every moral and political issue are involved in normative claims. For example, each side in the homosexuality debate is saying, "Homosexuals ought (or ought not) X."

I gave reference to a thread that leads to a book and a whole literature that sets out the difference between brute and social facts, which Leon dismissed as "failing to engage with the topic". — Banno

Pointing to books or threads is gish gallop and avoidance of engagement. I could equally point you to books or threads demonstrating my own position, but I don't do that because it is a failure to philosophically engage the points being discussed. You continually fail to engage the arguments presented.

I didn't want to spend an hour writing a response to it. — RogueAI

What happened is that you contradicted yourself by claiming that an act which is reproductively viable is not better in any way than an act that is not reproductively viable (except you put "better" in scare-quotes, which doesn't help in any obvious way - I explicitly asked what you mean by "better").

You contradicted yourself, I pointed it out, and then you failed to respond. That's what often happens on TPF. Coincidentally, every time someone is faced with their own contradiction they suddenly lack time to respond.

What this means is that we are faced with the question: should I pursue this debate with @RogueAI? If I show him that his position is self-contradictory, he will just ignore my response and walk away from the discussion. Is there any point in pursuing debates with individuals who do that?

You two sound like you're trying to justify treating them as subhuman. — RogueAI

This begs the question. That's precisely what you were trying (and failing) to prove.

I forgot that you are a moral non-naturalist: this OP is presupposing a form of moral naturalism. I don’t accept Hume’s guillotine... — Bob Ross

@Banno is actually contradicting himself with a double standard when he tells you that you can't promote 'oughts' because "ought cannot be derived from is." This is because every one of Banno's posts within this thread are premised on various 'oughts'. For example:

• Bob Ross ought not be discussing this topic.
• Bob Ross' position is immoral (and therefore ought not be held)
• Bob Ross ought not hold to Aristotelian Essentialism

If Banno really thought that 'oughts' were underivable or unassertable, then he himself would not be constantly engaged in ought-claims.

The unargued ought-claims are all coming from your opponents in this thread, and this is because they are expressing moral outrage (which in this case is based on their false perceptions about your position). Moral outrage presupposes ought-claims, and unargued moral outrage presupposes unargued ought-claims.

Because it establishes a moral principle: even if we concede the fetus is a person, abortion can still be permissible. — RogueAI

Okay, and that's a reasonable answer. :up:

Why are you pussyfooting around my example of the 12 year old raped girl? — RogueAI

Because you keep changing the subject to avoid answering difficult questions. For example, you didn't even manage to "pussyfoot" around <my last response to you>. You just ignored it altogether. It is not philosophically upright to ignore every response that is difficult and insist that that your interlocutor must now address some new topic that you've thought of.

Beyond that, you are engaged in emotive jumps. The proper tangent is not, "Is abortion permissible in cases of rape," but rather, "Does Thomson's analogy succeed in defending abortion in cases of rape?" Certainly Thomson's analogy is analogous to cases of rape such that my "coercion" objection fails in the case of rape. If I wanted to assess the analogy-argument with respect to the case of rape, I would need to see the actual text of Thomson's argument. Do you have that?

Thomson's violinist analogy was specifically about abortion in cases of rape, so it's not disanalogous to the 95% of abortions. It wasn't meant to address those. — RogueAI

Okay, supposing for the sake of argument that that is true, then the analogy is only analogous to 2-3% of abortions. My point is that an analogy that is only analogous to 2-3% of abortions cannot be a valid analogy with respect to abortion (generally). Why is an analogy that is only analogous to 2-3% of abortions continually trotted out as a good analogy vis-a-vis abortion?

Let's stay on topic for a moment in a thread that seems to move quickly from topic to topic.* Is an analogy valid if it is disanalogous in 95% of the cases it is meant to address?

* Some folk are very concerned to keep certain threads "on topic" while being very concerned to keep threads such as this one off topic.

Even if it really is degenerate? This is the basic, colloquial definition of bigotry:

“obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.”

You are begging the question because you are presupposing that my belief that, e.g., “engaging in BDSM is sexually degenerate” is true is unreasonable and false; but that’s the whole point in contention here, and what you are doing is labeling me with a word that no one wants to be labeled with so that it is easier to evade contending with my claim.

Do you think engaging in BDSM, e.g., is not sexually degenerate? If not, then what would count as sexually degenerate under your view and would any concession of the possibility of sexual degeneracy be considered bigotry on your view? — Bob Ross

Yep, great points. 's claim that anyone who calls someone "degenerate" must be a bigot is false. The irony is that it is often the people using the word "bigot" who are involved in bigotry. For example, it is bigotry to try to vilify anyone who thinks coitus is procreatively superior to other sexual acts with the slur "bigot" or "homophobe." Similarly, it is bigotry to obstinately persist in the claim that religion or faith must be irrational while continually failing to produce arguments for one's claim (link). "Bigotry" is thus becoming a meaningless word - a mere token in service of shibboleths.

The point <here> about "material positions" is very much bound up with bigotry. Those who answer SQ1 affirmatively are very often involved in bigotry, though not always.

...so that it is easier to evade contending with my claim. — Bob Ross

Too many people on TPF focus primarily on ways to avoid contending with positions that they dislike.

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In the violinist analogy, if you remove the tubes from yourself that are keeping the violinist alive, you are not actively killing him, you are failing to render aid. — RogueAI

The reason such fantastical analogies are pointless is because the only people who think the analogies are analogous are the ones who already believed the conclusion that the analogy is supposed to support. They don't convince anyone; they just confirm some in their own beliefs. The reason the purported analogy is disanalogous is because it depends on coercion, which is not present in pregnancy (except in cases of rape, which are relatively rare).

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Not quite; gender is fluid, because like all social artefacts it is the result of a "counts as..." statement (this is what Leontiskos is missing). — Banno

This is yet another failure to engage in .

I was actually also thinking of Plato when I mentioned the anecdote about Wittgenstein! — Pierre-Normand

Okay, interesting.

I must point out that unlike Wittgenstein's lecture notes (that he usually refrained from producing), and also unlike our dialogues with AIs, Plato's dialogues were crafted with a public audience in mind.

Secondly, Richard Bodeüs who taught us courses on Plato and Aristotle when I was a student at UdeM, mentioned that the reason Plato wrote dialogues rather than treatises, and his "unwritten doctrine" was notoriously reserved by him for direct oral transmission... — Pierre-Normand

I was intentionally prescinding from such theories, given that they are speculative academic musings. Whether or not anything the scholars think they know about Plato is actually true, his dialogues have beguiled the human race for millennia. The theories end up changing quite a bit over the centuries, but the text and its reception are stable insofar as it feels "alive" to the reader.

Him writing them was him making moves in the situated language game that was philosophical inquiry (and teaching) in his time and place. We can still resurrect those moves (partially) by a sort of archeological process of literary exegesis. — Pierre-Normand

In particular, I don't engage in this sort of analysis because I find it reductive. It situates Plato and his work in a way that subordinates them to modern and highly contingent/temporal categories, such as "language games." That's part of my overall point in the first place: Plato's dialogues are not easily reducible to such mundane categories. Precisely by being alive, they defy that sort of categorization. This is why I think they provide a helpful parallel to Wittgenstein or LLMs or especially Logical Positivists, which are simply not alive and beguiling in the same way that Plato is. I think the fact that Plato's work is so difficult to reduce to univocal categories is one of its defining marks. Its plurivocity is slighted by trying to enshrine it within the confines of a single voice or a single meaning.

I agree. But that's because in the first case there are at least two players playing a real game — Pierre-Normand

Yep, or even that they are not playing a game at all, but are doing something more real than a game. :up:

In a "private" dialogue between a human and a chatbot, there is just one player, as is the case when one jots down lecture notes primarily intended for use by oneself. But then, as Wittgenstein noted, the text tends to become stale. I surmise that this is because the words being "used" were meant as a linguistic scaffold for the development of one's thoughts rather than for the purpose of expressing those thoughts to a real audience. — Pierre-Normand

Right. Or to put it very simply, a dialogue is more interesting than a monologue, and a dialogue with a real person is more interesting than a "dialogue" with a pseudo-person. The "interest" that one seeks when reading a dialogue between two intellectual agents is apparently not the same thing one seeks when interacting with a chatbot, even though the simulation of personhood blurs that line mildly.

Yes, but just because something is more reproductively advantageous does not mean [...] the people doing the reproductively advantageous acts are "better" in any way. — RogueAI

No? Wouldn't you say that someone who does something that is more reproductively advantageous is better at reproducing than someone who doesn't (ceteris paribus)? If you disagree, then I would have to know how you are defining "better."

Your objection seems to rest on the claim, "X is more reproductively advantageous than Y, and X is not better than Y in any way." This is a common claim (contradiction) underlying your position. Your position seems to commit you to denying or overlooking obvious truths, such as the truth that if X is more reproductively advantageous than Y, then X is better than Y in one way.

You and Bob seem to be implying gays are inferior or need to be "cured" because they are not maximizing reproductive efficiency. — RogueAI

That's a strange leap. No one has said anything to that effect. But it is the sort of non-sequitur that is operative when someone wants to impute bad motive.

And if anal sex is reproductively disadvantageous, what about contraception? Abortion? Masturbation? Oral sex? Vasectomies? — RogueAI

They are relatively reproductively disadvantageous as well. They are examples of the "other sexual acts" I referenced here:

...the desire to be so "empathetic" that one no longer recognizes any reproductive difference between the act of coitus and other sexual acts. — Leontiskos

4 seems fair enough: if God gives the gift of life, he is not obliged to give it for an unlimited period of time. — hypericin

Well, if you are thinking of death as a natural event, then I don't see the difference between 3 and 4. Alternatively, if God gives a gift that allows one to die, hasn't he allowed death?

Straight man like anal sex too. — RogueAI

Well, would you concede that coitus is more reproductively advantageous than anal sex, and therefore better insofar as the reproduction of the species is concerned? And if one accepts the theory of Darwinian evolution, then they would probably also concede that because coitus contributes more to a species' survival than anal sex, evolution therefore favors coitus in a special way. This is why a Darwinian evolutionist such as Richard Dawkins is also quite skeptical of the claims of gender theory, particularly when those claims are taken to the remarkable conclusions which many activists promote. If a species does not enact and favor the uniqueness of coitus, then they fail to understand their own reproductive means.

This is an instance of what Gad Saad calls "suicidal empathy," e.g. the desire to be so "empathetic" that one no longer recognizes any reproductive difference between the act of coitus and other sexual acts. The reasoning goes: <If we recognize that an opposite-sex couple has greater reproductive power than a same-sex couple, then we are failing to be empathetic and egalitarian; We cannot fail to be empathetic and egalitarian; Therefore, we cannot recognize that an opposite-sex couple has greater reproductive power than a same-sex couple>. Saad sees that sort of reasoning as suicidal at the species-level given that it disregards the survival of the species. The more general form of the reasoning is: <My idea is so good and so right, that the possibility that it will destroy the whole is irrelevant>.

- I think is arguing from natural evils rather than moral evils:

But what I had in mind was more natural disasters. Not only does he allow these, but at least in some sense he actively brings them about. The natural world, as I understand monotheism, is an expression of God's will. — hypericin

I touched on the same sort of thing here:

Digging deeper, (4) and (5) have to do with the idea that death is inevitable, and that for a person to die is not inherently unjust. This opens up the can of worms of the metaphysics and ethics of death, and the adjacent can of worms is the question of God's sovereignty within which question is the matter of whether God is responsible for death (or whether God "directly intends" the fact of natural death).

So this all gets complicated quickly, and therefore it is hard to try to capture the various complexities with a syllogism or two. For example, if everything that occurs is allowed by God to occur, and if this allowance counts as an intentional bringing-about, then it follows that everyone who dies is murdered. The reductio in this case lies in the idea that murder and death are two different things. Note too that we are wrestling with precisely the same issue that the Hebrews wrestled with in trying to understand God's sovereignty and providence (in, for example, hardening or not-hardening Pharaoh's heart). — Leontiskos

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Allowing evil is itself a kind of evil. — hypericin

What I would say is that @Bob Ross' OP prescinds from this question of whether allowing evil is evil, and that this is okay given the thorniness of that question. He therefore isolates Biblical passages where the stronger premise can be used, namely the premise that the committing (or else commanding) of evil is evil. So your observation is salient in certain ways, but in other ways it is a different argument than the one Ross has given.

Suppose we take the male sex and the social role of begetting/impregnating. Begetting is not merely a social role, but it is also a social role... — Leontiskos

Fertilising an ovum and bearing a child are not social roles. — Banno

Why not? Do you have any arguments, or only assertions?

Given your continual lack of argumentation and philosophical engagement, I will guess at your rationale, as it always proves futile to try to get you to give an argument yourself:

The probable reason you reject bearing children (and fertilizing ova) as social roles is because you are begging the question. You think: <If something pertains to sex, then it is not a social role; bearing children pertains to sex; therefore bearing children is not a social role>. This is of course fallacious reasoning which depends on the very conclusion you were meant to prove. Other, similar arguments suffer the same fate, e.g.: <A power one is born with cannot ground a social role; the ability to bear children is a power females are born with; therefore the bearing of children is not a social role>.

(At this point in the conversation your usual route is to fault me for guessing at your arguments, and you will call my guesses strawmen. But again, if you are not willing to provide your own arguments then I can do little more than guess. If what I have presented are strawmen, then you will have to offer the alternative to the strawmen. If you cannot offer any alternative, then there is no reason to believe my guesses are strawmen.)

- I myself do not see how discussing the nature of AI is off-topic in threads about whether AI should be banned, or in threads on how AI should be used. As I read it, TPF precedent does not exclude discussing the presuppositions of an OP within that thread.

But if you want, feel free to quote what I say here in your own thread. I am planning to do the same with some of your own quotes elsewhere.

The passage starts on page 57 and goes to page 61. — Paine

It’s a wonderful excerpt, deeply relevant to our own time. Kierkegaard points out the way that Christianity has raised the eyes of man, but also notes that the equalities to which the worldly are devoted are much different from Christian equality.

To secure an equal place in the world with other men, to make temporal conditions as similar as possible for all men, those are certainly things that worldliness considers of extreme importance. But even in this respect, what we may venture to call the well-intentioned worldly effort never completely understands Christianity. The well-intentioned worldliness holds itself piously—if one wishes to call it that—convinced that there must be one temporal condition, one earthly difference—which one may find by the help of calculations and surveys, or in any other preferred manner—where there is equality. If this condition were to become the only one for all men, then equality would be brought about. But partly, this cannot be done, and partly, this common equality of all arising from having the same temporal differences, is not at all Christian equality; worldly equality, even if it were possible, is not Christian equality. And to bring about a perfect worldly equality is an impossibility. — Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 59-60

Now I’m not exactly sure how this relates to the thread, although I agree that Kierkegaard admits a kind of “well-intentioned worldliness.” I don’t think I’ve said anything to the contrary.

My statement was a reaction to hearing that there were those for whom "there is little of value in the explicitly Christian character of Søren Kierkegaard’s thinking." Perhaps I was over broad in my response, but I wanted to signal that such a view is very far from own. I don't have the problem Penner is addressing. — Paine

Okay, understood.

I, too, find the OP lacking because it does not specify the text being read. There is no way to know if it has the problem Penner objects to or not. — Paine

Right. This is what I see claiming: “The preacher thinks the truth of faith can be taught, but according to Kierkegaard this is impossible. Therefore there is something wrong with preaching.” My response is to say that, according to Kierkegaard, in the proper and fullest sense, truth can never be taught except by God, and this includes faith. For Kierkegaard, the human teacher is modeled on Socrates, and because he does not have the capacity to impart knowledge in the way that God can impart knowledge, he is only a teacher—or in this case a preacher—to a limited extent. Thus if we situate the preaching of faith within Kierkegaard’s larger understanding of teaching, there is nothing sui generis about faith’s “unteachableness,” and the problem of the OP is dissolved.

According to Penner the error derives from an irrationalist/existentialist reading of Kierkegaard, which thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Caleb Miller indulge. For example, he quotes Miller claiming that Kierkegaard is “Chief among those who have defended the view that reason undermines faith, and that Christian faith should spurn reason.” Penner argues that Kierkegaard’s critique of reason is a critique of a very specific form of reason, namely the secular reason of modern philosophy:

The concept of “secular” used here has in mind the Kierkegaardian contrast between Christianity and “the world,” which parallels several other contrasts made in Kierkegaard’s texts, such as that between the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite, transcendence and immanence, and the religious and the aesthetic. For example, Anti-Climacus, in The Sickness unto Death, describes “the secular mentality” in terms of mortgaging oneself to “the world” and later correlates secularity with finitude, culture, and civic justice. In this case, secular indicates a this-worldly, immanental sphere of mundane, material reality and relations, in contrast to an immaterial, transcendent sphere of spiritual reality and relations. Secularity, in this sense, involves a lack of openness to extrahuman transcendence rather than denoting the mere denigration of religion. To speak of modern philosophy’s view of reason as secular, then, is to say that its rational norms will be those that are governed by the terms of immanence—such as universal access, objectivity, neutrality—so that human reason may dissolve every paradox, unify each difference, and (potentially) provide an overarching explanation whose intelligibility and justification depend exclusively on factors within its immanental purview.

Thus the Kierkegaardian charge is not that modern philosophy is explicitly atheistic or that it denies religious transcendence or God-talk altogether. Some of Kierkegaard’s favorite targets, such as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, attempt to rescue Christian theology rather than deny or destroy it, and Kierkegaard regularly assumes that the edifice he refers to as “modern speculation” understands itself to be explicitly “Christian.” Therein is precisely Kierkegaard’s trouble with modern philosophy—that modern philosophy unwittingly produces a pseudo-Christianity— and the Kierkegaardian critique of reason and modern philosophy will be incoherent if one does not recognize his fundamentally religious diagnosis of modernity. — Penner, 380-1

What emerges here is the possibility of a critique of preaching that is nevertheless not a critique of every kind of preaching. It is precisely the preaching or teaching of the pseudo-Christianity, produced by the rationalistic modus operandi of modern philosophy, that Kierkegaard finds fault with. It does not follow from this that a father cannot teach his children about the faith, and of course this was in no way Kierkegaard’s intention.

And of course Kierkegaard’s point is not that there can be no such thing as a well-intentioned worldliness, but even in your excerpt from Works of Love Kierkegaard is distinguishing that worldliness from authentic Christianity—in that case distinguishing worldly equality from Christian equality. The parallel is salutary insofar as we could imagine the same worldly man programmatically devising a way to bring about equality, and also programmatically devising a way to preach such that his sermon’s “moment in time has decisive significance so that the hearer could not for a moment forget it” (Fragments). In both cases what is being rejected as falling short of Christianity is secular or worldly reason.

It should be made explicit that the views advocated in the OP are not only fraught with philosophical difficulties, but that they are ethically questionable. You and I have discussed elsewhere how there is a tendency amongst conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, to think of themselves as the arbiters of morality, as possessing a special moral authority. It is well worth pointing out that their views on topics such as gender, abortion, capital punishment, race and so on are widely considered immoral. — Banno

There is a moral arbiter here, but you've not identified him. He is the one always working behind the scenes to try to censor the things he disagrees with instead of arguing against them.

The core here is that the contents of one's underwear is not generally a suitable justification for one's role in society. — Banno

So would you argue with that the role of fertilizing ova does not belong to males and the role of bearing children through pregnancy does not belong to females? Let's see some arguments instead of ad hominem insults and the casting of aspersions. If you can only produce such sub-rational censorship, then it's no wonder the world is not buying what you're selling. The vast majority of people in the world and even in your culture are well aware that there are distinctively male acts and distinctively female acts, such as fertilizing ova and bearing children through pregnancy. Pretending everyone who disagrees with you is a bigot won't change that.

-

- Good points. :up:

...Similarly, a computer has no existence outside of what we do with it and how we interpret what we do with it. — Joshs

Up to this point in your post I had nothing to disagree with. :up:

So when we say that the mind works differently than a computer, we are comparing two different ways of interacting with our environment. — Joshs

I think you're tripped up here insofar as you are implicitly saying, "One way we interact with our environment is through our mind, and another way of interacting with our environment is through computers." That's not quite right, as I'm sure you can see.

If we understand the working of our computers ‘diadically’ and the working of our minds ‘triadically’, in both cases we are talking about the working of our minds. We should say, then, that the one way of using our minds is more limited than the other, but not less ‘authentic’ or more ‘artificial’. Artifice and niche construction IS what the authentic mind does. The engineer ( or Sam Altman) who claims that their invented a.i. device thinks just like a human is correct in that the device works according to principles that they believe also describe how the mind works. — Joshs

But I would argue that Altman is mistaken if he believes that his AI works the same as a human mind. The dyadic/triadic distinction is an account of how that difference manifests with respect to sign-use. Computers are intrinsically dyadic phenomena. They are a vast stimulus-response network in sets of dyads. Now one response to this is to say that humans too are a complex dyadic network which appears triadic, but I don't find that plausible.

As our self-understanding evolves, we will continually raise the bar on what it means for our devices to ‘think like us’. In a way, they always has thought like us, being nothing more that appendages which express our own models and theories of how we think. But as this thinking evolves , the nature of the machines we build will evolve along with it. — Joshs

It does evolve, but never beyond the intrinsic limitations of machines. But you are essentially correct when you claim that what is at stake is a tool of the human mind. That is a very important point.

That's sort of the question or the beginning for much of my thoughts here: Why does what I read mean anything at all?

What is meaning?

Mostly I just assume that we mean things by words. Insofar that we hold meaning constant between one another -- clarify terms -- then we can start talking about what is true.

But there are other ways of using words -- and that's where the "triadic structure" comes under question for me, in a way. Not that it's false, but that it changes, and so meaning would also change. — Moliere

That's right. The key is that humans mean things by words, but LLMs do not, and a neural net does not change that. Computers are not capable of manipulating symbols or signs qua symbols or signs. Indeed, they are not sign-users or symbol-users. A neural net is an attempt to get a non-sign-using machine to mimic a sign-using human being. The dyadic/triadic distinction is just part of the analysis of signs and sign use.

- Glad you agree. :up:

Why do you want to say that impregnating is uniquely performed by males? — unenlightened

Because I do not think non-males impregnate. Do you?

Do you not think that women have a rather larger 'role' in impregnation than men? — unenlightened

Females (or if you like, women) do not beget/impregnate, but are rather impregnated. The small, mobile male gametes move to the female's large, immobile gametes rather than vice versa. The male's gametes are given; the female's gametes receive what is given by the male. The male is the active giver of gametes; the female is passive receiver of gametes. The sperm moves from the male into the female, in order to fertilize the ovum. This is what it means to say that the male begets/impregnates and the female becomes pregnant, and it is basic scientific biology.

Is there something in this account that you object to? Or is all this talk about "lie back and think of England" an emotional red herring?

- Suppose we take the male sex and the social role of begetting/impregnating. Begetting is not merely a social role, but it is also a social role. If we say that social roles pertain to gender, and gender is separate from sex, then we would not be able to say that the social role of begetting/impregnating is uniquely performed by males. But that seems entirely incorrect, doesn't it?

And again, the argument is not that every male must perform the act of begetting/impregnating in order to be a male, but rather that begetting/impregnating is a male role which is inaccessible to females, and therefore there do exist social roles restricted by sex. One cannot beget/impregnate without being a male and one cannot become pregnant without being a female. In Aristotelian language we would say that males have the power of begetting/impregnating precisely in virtue of their maleness; precisely in virtue of their sex.

Neural nets aren't radically other from other computers, imo. — Moliere

Authentic intelligence is generally seen as triadic, whereas computers are reductively dyadic. As C. S. Peirce or Walker Percy argue, a meaning-sign is irreducibly triadic, involving the sign, the thing signified, and the person who combines the two via intellect (cf. symbolon: "thrown together"). Programmers have always been attempting to get the dyadic structure of computers to model or approximate the triadic structure of meaning and thought, and neural nets are simply the latest iteration of that project. At each stage in the project the successes are highlighted and the ways in which the approximation fails to adequately model a triadic act are downplayed. This downplaying makes sense given the tacit assumption that a dyadic system will never completely model triadic behavior, but there comes a point when one must be reminded of what meaning is, what truth is, why the meaning relation is triadic, what humans are actually doing when they engage in intellectual acts, etc. Without such reminders the enthusiasts quickly convince themselves that there is no difference between their newest iteration and an actual human mind.

Here's an article that addresses the issues we're dealing with:

https://nfhs.org/stories/the-role-of-ai-in-debate-ethics-research-and-responsible-use

It's from a national association for high schools related to debate rules, which seems close enough to what we do. — Hanover

An excerpt from the article:

The Ethics of AI in Debate

While AI can be a helpful tool, its misuse raises ethical concerns. Some students may be tempted to rely on AI to generate entire cases or fabricate evidence. This undermines the core purpose of debate: developing critical thinking, analytical reasoning and research skills.

The ethical use of AI in debate means:

Transparency: If AI is used in research or case writing, debaters should disclose it to their coaches and ensure all information is properly verified.

Original Thought: AI can assist with structuring arguments, but debaters should craft their own speeches and rebuttals to develop authentic critical-thinking skills.

Avoiding Fabrication: AI sometimes produces false information or made-up citations. Using AI to generate sources without verifying them is academic dishonesty. — The Role of AI in Debate: Ethics, Research and Responsible Use

This is good, and tracks what many of us have been saying. The article has a good focus on verifying and understanding the primary sources oneself, instead of merely trusting the AI's mediation.

@Jamal, @Baden -

This could be a good compromise position to take while sorting out the issue of whether or in what way AI quotations are permissible:

If posters wish to illustrate their arguments with snippets of their conversation with AIs, I would encourage them to put those behind spoilers. — Pierre-Normand

...also a bit overblown and misrepresented in the media, since when you dig into the primary reports it's generally the case that the LLMs didn't decide to deceive on their own accord but did it instrumentally to fulfill objectives explicitly given to them. — Pierre-Normand

I think these are just the basic ways we should expect people to be mislead by LLMs, such as imputing "deliberate deceit." The notion of deceit is parasitic on the notion of truth. In order to deceive one must first know what is true (and what 'truth' is!) and then intentionally lead someone to believe something contrary to what is true. Because LLMs cannot make truth-claims or understand truth, they cannot deceive. Going back to my scare-quotes heuristic, we could only say something like this: <The LLM "deliberately" "deceived" me, "leading" me in a direction that it "knew" to be "false">.

What is occurring in these cases is usually a petitio principii where one arrives at a conclusion which presupposes that the LLM is self-conscious or is a person, only by presuming beforehand that the LLM is self-conscious or is a person.* The only way around this is to establish a robust definition and epistemic approach to personhood or self-consciousness. But even if someone proved that LLMs are self-conscious persons—which I hold is impossible—the cultural belief that LLMs are persons would grow, independent of that proof. Put differently, given the nature of our culture and the popularity and usefulness of LLMs, the culture will inevitably assent to the personhood of LLMs in both subtle and overt ways, and this assent will be fallacious. "It is useful to pretend that LLMs are persons, therefore LLMs are persons," is a fallacy, but the fallacious nature of such reasoning will be roundly ignored by a deeply pragmatic and self-centered culture. When this is combined with "intersubjective" theories of truth, and LLMs are inducted into the group of intersubjective subjects, fallacious reasoning of this sort will self-justify itself and the fallacious roots will grow exponentially as we become more and more dependent on LLMs within our intersubjective orientation—for LLMs simply magnify what we already believe and minimize what we already disbelieve, both propositionally and methodologically. They are a giant confirmation bias.

But I know I have a number of other posts of yours to respond to. :grin:


* For example, the person who has convinced themselves that the LLM is deliberately deceiving them had already convinced themselves that the LLM was deliberately revealing truths to them. The small lie or self-deception always grows into larger ones.

You refuse to lead the horse to water, and the horse is parched.... — Bob Ross

There are some groups of secular people who have imbibed certain moral/social doctrines in a quasi-religious way. In religious contexts a central dogma is usually protected by concentric "fences." So for example, in Judaism one is not allowed to speak the sacred name, and because of this a "fence" is erected by replacing that word in the sacred texts with "Lord." This makes it that much easier to follow the dogma.

What your OP does is transgress one of the fences of the religious beliefs of the secular left. The central dogma is something like, "Trans people must be respected" (which is of course fine at far as it goes). One of the fences is something like, "Trans people's claims about what they are must be accepted as true," and that fence in turn requires that one draw a very strong distinction between sex and gender. The distinction must be sufficiently strong to support the trans person's claim that they are a man or woman. This is done by making the claim a gender claim, and this of course requires separating gender from sex. This is but the most common way to logically justify that self-identity claim.

In any case, you are in effect committing heresy against one of the fences which sits around a dogma of the secular left, and that is why you are being attacked and insulted. The response one would give is salutary, "But why must I believe that trans people's claims are true in order to respect them?," but the religious reason for erecting the fence is not logical per se. Instead it is practical or communal or a matter of sacred centres. What is at stake is not exactly a logical entailment so much as a matter of protecting a quasi-religious dogma. The core of the issue probably turns on disambiguating what is meant by the word "respect" within the central dogma that is driving the whole fence system, but it should be seen that for the one who reads the claim in a dogmatic or sacred sense, "respect" must be given the broadest reading possible, in order to provide the dogma with sufficient life-shaping force.

I touched on the rationale for refusing to rationally justify one's dogmas or taboos in <this post> as well as in the following one. That move actually exists in all religious and quasi-religious traditions to different extents. Usually, though, we see a healthy religion as one which does not impose its views by force on those who do not accept them, and that is why I believe that the religion in question is unhealthy.

It is uncontroversially true in America that what I explicated is the liberal agenda — Bob Ross

That's true, but outside of the context of American politics liberalism qua philosophy refers to classical liberalism, and classical liberalism requires one to provide reasons and arguments for their position. For this reason what is happening on the secular left with their quasi-religious fences is quite different from classical liberalism, and this is why classical liberals of various stripes have opposed the secular left or the progressive left (e.g. Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, and even pundits like Bill Maher). A well-known conservative classical liberal and professor at Princeton is Robert P. George, who was recently interviewed by Jordan B. Cooper. At one point in the interview George is talking about the way that non-sectarian and sectarian universities both have a place within society. From about 52:24-54:38 he speaks to the question of whether there could be a sectarian university which favors the quasi-religion of what I have called the "secular left," and what he says there is much to the point in understanding the difference between classical liberalism and the secular forms of sectarianism that are often called "liberal" in the American political context.

If you are interested in the arguments and philosophy undergirding the sacred cow then I would encourage you to have a look at Cooper's video on Judith Butler that I linked <here>. There are philosophical antecedents and groundings for these views, even if they are not being enunciated by the folks who are attacking you within this thread.

- Keep offering philosophy to those who don't rise above name-calling. :up:

I don't agree with that. My point was that we can refuse to allow AI simply because we prefer humans... — Hanover

But isn't this just an ad hoc reason if one has no idea why they prefer humans? One can make arbitrary rules, but they don't usually last very long.

Edit: The other thing I would suggest is that the rule cannot be enforced as easily as other rules, and therefore relies more on persuasion than other rules do. "Because I prefer it," is not the most persuasive rationale.

The problem is more that your exposure has not been to more recent developments. — Banno

That's a thin dismissal, void of any real argument or engagement. Beyond that, not a few have pointed out that your own approach is very limited in its exposure. Aristotelianism and Neo-Aristotelianism is one of the most influential philosophical traditions in all of human history, and it continues to flourish today even outside of the English-speaking world.

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. — Hanover

I think its at least good that you are enunciating the claim which floats in the background, and which many are afraid to make outright. Similarly, I have pointed out that if we don't understand why there is a difference between AI and humans, a rule against AI cannot stand.

I think where I'm landing is at the unfortunate conclusion that if meaning is use (and that seems a prevailing view) — Hanover

I actually don't think it's a prevailing view at all. I think it's the view of a vocal minority, and a rather small one at that. Maybe that's closer to what was saying: "Who cares about Wittgenstein?" Why would we let Wittgenstein set the tone?

I find the the appeals to Wittgenstein... — sime

I agree that the flaws you identify make Wittgenstein a poor example in certain ways. That is, I think Wittgenstein's texts are more "dead" than better philosophical texts, and therefore they present a bar that is too low. There is a similarity between indulging Wittgenstein's texts and indulging AI that would not be present with someone like Plato. But I'm not sure this bears one way or another on the legitimacy of AI.

So if AI should not be quoted because of source uncertainty, then what is the justification on this forum for allowing people to quote Wittgenstein? — sime

I'm not sure anyone is arguing that source uncertainty is the reason AI should not be quoted. I think @Pierre-Normand gave the summary of that idea quite well:

The idea of using their argument is strange since AI's never take ownership for them. If you've grasped the structure of the argument, checked the relevant sources to ensure it's sound in addition to being valid, and convinced yourself that it's cogent and perspicuous (that is, constitutes an apt framing of the problem), then the argument becomes one that you can make your own. — Pierre-Normand

Another way to put it, slightly different: <Arguments must have some speaker who takes responsibility for them; AI is not a speaker; Therefore AI quotes, given as arguments, are impermissible>.

The AI afficionado will respond by saying, "But I wasn't offering the quote as an argument. I was offering the quote as a consideration." At this point I think we must recognize that we understand the afficionado's intention better than they do (or at least profess to). The people on this forum who are going around publishing posts with no content other than AI content are not merely "offering the quote as a consideration." They are quoting the AI because they agree with the output and want the AI output to affect the course of the thread in which they are posting. As @Pierre-Normand says, if they think the argument is worthwhile then they should take the responsibility for the argument and leave out the AI middle-man. "Offering a quote" for pure consideration, with true neutrality, does occur in some cases but it is very rare. And it usually only happens within an OP, not in the midst of a thread's tug-of-war.

The more AI-generated content floats about the forum, the more there will be "arguments" without any speaker who takes responsibility for them. The more AI-generated content floats about the forum, the more our thinking will be outsourced to AI. This is true whether or not the AI content is plagiarized or transparently sourced.