I agree with you that discourse about this is overblown. Scientific American talks about 'the universe' and 'reality'. These big claims are extrapolations from quantum physics, but quantum physics is about the behaviour of particles. Particle entanglement happens; it now has many practical applications. But we have no idea how this, which relates very specifically to the act of measurement whether by human or machine or other particles, relates to reality and the universe.

a lens through which we can reconsider existence and the limits of logic — mlles

I suppose I would say this sort of notion works best for me, without pseudo-philosophical trappings, when I enjoy a work of art. In the last couple of weeks for instance I've seen Laurie Anderson do a live show (Let x=x), read a startling novel by Olga Tokarckuk, and been to an exhibition about Florence in 1504. All of these, one way or another, offered me marvellous lenses through which I (re)considered existence, and, sometimes, the limits of logic. Raphael picking up artistic tricks from Leonardo or Michaelangelo - it's pretty insightful, at least for me.

Consider the 'blind spot'. When a human being sees anything, their physiology means they have a blind spot in the scene, a blank which their imagination fills in by reference to neighbouring parts of the image.

I recall a reductionist explanation of this phenomenon wherein the scientist explained the blind spot, and went on to say, 'whereas in reality...' there may be something different there, in that blind spot.

The reductionist wanted there to be reality or not-reality, a binary choice. But to me the difference between ordinary visual perception and visual perception through instruments involve different angles on 'reality', which one might distinguish by talk of 'degrees'.

Dolphins are known to use signature whistles, and to be able to mimic other dolphins' signature whistles. It seems likely that the more intelligent animals employ a limited range of symbolic vocalisations.

Dolphin whistles

its output shows that it can draw conclusions about itself — Carlo Roosen

I suppose I would say, its output demonstrates that it can have the appearance of drawing conclusions about itself. Human beings have a long history of letting metaphorical descriptions blend into the non-metaphorical. The notion that AI can draw conclusions is a metaphor, in my view.

The first person perspective, the "being", it is impossible to experience in another human, let alone in a computer.
... But also ChatGPT has an image of itself, you can ask it about itself and it will answer. — Carlo Roosen

If it's impossible to experience the first person experience in another, how do you know that ChatGPT has an image of itself? It certainly reproduces forms of words that humans have used to describe having an image of themselves, but in what way is that evidence that it does indeed have an image of itself, and isn't simply obeying its instructors and owners by plagiarising material that has been used to 'train' it?

If you're allowing the children to be out late that's a sign of a high-trust society and the practice reflects that.
— BitconnectCarlos

Three year olds in a busy urban street? Trust who? Do you just argue to argue? — schopenhauer1

When I was a 3-year-old, in a middle-class English suburb, I played out in the street till late-ish. That culture was more trusting than modern middle--class culture. To my mind the biggest danger to such a child is the growth of car ownership; cars and 3-year-olds don't mix unless the car drivers are super careful. To me this sort of issue is the crux of debates about 'culture'. Increased car use and diminished public transport use are associated with greater individualism and distrust of others, fear of the stranger. But much cultural argument wants to blame / scapegoat 'others': gangs of youths, dangerous individuals. Car-lovers don't want to blame cars. Car-loving gets invisibly embedded in 'culture', so even now, we find it easier to imagine, to deal with the climate crisis, electric cars, instead of *less* cars.

i can't say I yearn for high-visibility symbolic projects, though I do yearn for the lost oil riches of the 80s'. One thing we're not mentioning is the unravelling of Thatcherite reforms from the 80's:

- privatisation of water is now a big issue since the 'owners' keep discharging shit into rivers and beaches while taking their dividends and loading up their companies with debt.
- the 'right to buy' for social housing tenants has distorted the housing market and the British middle class regard their homes as 'assets' which are supposed to keep appreciating
- privatisation of rail (1990s) has long been a mess and the Tories initiated a de facto renationalisation, which Labour are putting on a formal footing
- the UK has become a startlingly corrupt place. E.g., Billions vanished into the pockets of friends-of-Tories during Covid; housebuilding and weapons manufacture are often riddled with bribery; social housing in some areas is largely occupied by illegal sub-tenants. The mood is exemplified by the new PM obviously not realising that accepting freebie clothing and football tickets might be regarded as dodgy.

There is a widespread sense of disaffection where I live, out in the sticks. The prime minister has a negative approval rating. The electoral system gave Labour a landslide, but oddly enough, they got less actual votes in 2024 than in 2019 - 9708mn versus 10269mn - because there was a low turnout (around 60% of the 'electorate' voted, and it's widely believed that a growing proportion of the population don't register to vote).

Quite disturbingly, the new incumbents don't seem to be bringing with them a sense of stability and competence. I am biassed, as a Green Party member of long standing! But the rule of the Conservatives was much more disturbing: wildly inept and very mendacious. They presided over a big increase in immigration yet made that an issue to be fought over by creating 'illegal migration' and stigmatising the poor devils who cross the English Channel in boats, while welcoming the bankers IT gurus and marketeers with open arms.

I don't know how this widespread sense of disaffection might change. The proposed economic policies seem like Blairism without the resources, using private capital that imprisons future revenue in repayment of loans, whether directly or through what un mentions, the disposal of community assets to private companies.

i presume this is Part 1: Part 1

Autonomous vehicles sound like the closest thing to what you're describing. They're equipped with sensors humans don't have. — fishfry

At the moment, of course, autonomous vehicles aren't autonomous. Indeed, it's very expensive to fund the support staff. As a prof commented in this NY Times article:

“It may be cheaper just to pay a driver to sit in the car and drive it,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence. — prof

Consider ‘computer’. Roughly before 1950 in saying that word people would mean, a person who did computations. Roughly after that, they would mean, a machine that did computations.

Of course there are experts who can make acceptable decrees. In the early 50s atomic explosions created new elements like einsteinium, 99 in the table.

Sometimes we accept decrees in language, but mostly we go with the flow. Every year there are new ideas in the music/software games, for example, that I’ve lost track of.

Singer has the right criticism but it is directed at the individual when it needs to be directed at the way of life that is imposed on the individual, of being morally responsible for social inequalities that they are entirely isolated from — unenlightened

Power and greed and corruptible seed / seem to be all that there is...

Indeed. Still an individual can sing it as they see it. And pawns can play a game in different ways.

I confess I am shocked - as a moderately committed Green - by how many people agree that climate change is a Big Issue, then buy a bigger car to leave at the airport for their twenty-fifth flight on a holiday in some overheated landscape. Humans tend to use the individual's helplessness as a justification for omitting to make the most marginal and relatively undemanding changes to our styles of life.

It seems like Aristotle thinks that the nature of the human species is such that we should care about each other and seek to be just — Bob Ross

Aristotle thought we should care about each other, or seek to be just, in the right way at the right time for the right reasons. This is subtler and more limited than the more general claim you're making. It's also his proposal that we should make a quilt of these virtues with others like self-love, philia of friends; indeed it is virtuous to be 'magnanimous' in the right way etc., and to be angry as appropriate, for example. Eudaimonia is a complex of right behaviours.

It seems as if there is the shadow of the later Christianised Aristotle falling across your thoughts, in the generalised claims about caring and justice, and in the very notion of a 'devil' for instance, and your passing reference to 'God'.

Aristotle was a mentor to Macedonian future kings, most notably Alexander the great. He advocated Alexander's conquests and thought Athenians might in their wars treat other peoples as 'beasts', which has a bit of a devilish air to me.

Aristotle emphasises self-love in a way which is sometimes interpreted as narcissism, but that might be a modern preoccupation. If one does not love oneself, in the appropriate Aristotelian way - at the right time for the right reasons - then one's ability to fulfil one's 'ergon' is diminished: personally that seems sound enough to me. He does emphasise the importance of 'philia', which the usual translation as 'friendship' rather mutes, and this is a grounding in a kind of mutuality, an intense friendship with a small group of people, that often gets hurried past.

More generally, given your fin-de-siecle opening, I don't understand how you demonstrate that Aristotelian ethics and moral anti-realism are incompatible, which is presumably your aim. The arete/virtues are not represented by Aristotle as factual or everlasting, the arrival at the 'mean' between different extremes is a subtle and nuanced analysis, and the whole approach requires a good society (with a good if unmentioned quota of slaves to do the donkey-work) with education from an early age, to inculcate the habits of virtue.

If you're a panpsychist, then as a blob of matter you were already quite something, with capacity for imagination. Your experiential transformation to humanity was surely only one of growth and complexity. You already were part of a world where Matter exists, at least partly, to know itself. That is panpsychism's self-explanation: all is part of the nature of 'matter'.

Aren't all scientific theories underdetermined? Does that mean science, in general, reflects our biases, our worldviews, our pet perspectives? — frank

To generalise so broadly does seem to me to obscure the underdetermination involved. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measurement of the gravitational constant doesn't reflect our biases etc.; that much modern neuroscience, as a different example, is infected with biases and pet perspectives given the small evidence base, and often obscures this to make generalisations about humans; and that 'social science' of necessity is understood to be inflected by the worldview of the scientists and their culture.

But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. — Michel Bitbol

I don't think Bitbol has it right here. If you talk to physicists or biochemists, say, about their experimental work, scientists are trying to eliminate the effects of their bodies on the matter in hand because they regard that as the right thing to do in that context. If one is trying to identify how variables interact, one has to 'assume' ceteris paribus, that the rest of the world holds still, even though it doesn't. A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes.

Then a 'scientific' approach would be, separately and perhaps within a different scientific discipline, to identify the effect of bodies or equipment holding everything else still.

I appreciate the result may still be the same, but I do think us arty-farts sometimes castigate scientists, if only implicitly, for things they understand perfectly well.

Perhaps some poems are also your magic spells. This is by Emily Dickinson.

Me from Myself -- to banish --
Had I Art --
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart --

But since Myself -- assault Me --
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication --
Me -- of Me?

It seems there has been large-scale bypassing of the constraints placed on scraping material by using robots.txt.

Reuters link here.

You argue that AGI will 'come into being' but will not necessarily be 'a sentient being'. How would this work?

purpose comes with – or is invented by – mind. Bottom line, purpose is boot-strapped. And for most people that never being an adequate account, they invent something, usually, G/god/s, but maybe also technology and science meet the need for purpose. — tim wood

To me this is certainly the zone where the question comes from: that life is always toppling forwards, and being curious reason-seeking animals, humans ask for purposes. I too am a Collingwood man: the answers form an empty set. But the presuppositions that people bring to the question are interesting. Using the word 'mind' for instance is amazingly frequent, even among materialists.

The industrialisation of the Soviet Union, and later of Communist China, were staggering achievements. And the USSR's contribution to the defeat of Germany in 1944-45 was heroic. Russian art, music, dance and literature are all stunning. None of these things were 'failures'.

But sadly Shostakovich, for instance, produced his greatest work while sleeping with a suitcase ever-packed, ready to flee.

Sadly it wasn't the foulness of Stalinist tyranny that caused the Soviet Union eventually to 'fail', either, but a gradual post-Stalin collapse in economic and social management, as the social democracies of Europe, N America and elsewhere began to vastly outperform the USSR.

I travelled to Uzbekistan in the 2000's. (Samarkand! What glorious sights!) The differences between Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, on the one hand, and Uzbekistan / Kyrgyzstan on the other, were and are profound - the Communist legacy includes a much higher level of literacy and women's equality, and suppression of radical Islam.

The legacy also, alas, involved former commissars becoming dictators of each -istan: these countries lack a grounding of any kind of democracy except the (former) weak intra-Party democracy of the Communist era. Their precarious governments, like Putin's Russia, seem to me a good deal more experimental than Communism, though of course in 1921 Lenin and his mates were indeed making it up as they went along.

In order to arrive at the concept of the number unit, one must turn away from the meaningful world of continually changing senses by inventing a new notion, that of the empty, context and content-free particularity, a particularity which can be returned to again and again as ‘same thing different time’ because it has no content, stands for nothing other than a placemark. — Joshs

I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the names for certain numbers correspond to different parts of the body - hence, digits. Some of the names for numbers have magical or (un)lucky qualities, or associations with non-numbers.

Then it would be in algebra, the generalisation of counting, that one arrives at 'same thing different time'. But perhaps this is what you meant.

The psychology literature doesn't designate a name for this phenomenon, though there's plenty of research about it. Libet called last minute changes of intention 'the veto power'. Robert Reimer in this paper summarises it thus:

...agents are normally embodied in their own body with all its neural processes. However, this feeling of embodiment can also be interrupted if neural processes accompanying an earlier action intention cause a muscle contraction that does not conform with the agent’s current action intention. This non-conformity, in turn, is grounded in the delay of those neural processes that accompany the agent’s earlier action intention and the slowness of her current intention’s neural processes. — Robert Reimer

"Everything has a function or purpose and its essential nature is to grow and achieve its purpose." — Gnomon

This is to conflate two different ideas in Aristotle. What's usually translated as 'function' is 'ergon', the special nature of what is named, e.g. a knife cuts, humans engage in soul-based rational consideration. This is different to 'telos' or 'end', the purpose of an activity.

Not 'Fountain' - that thing is worth millions. But much art is thrown away and burnt too. Often art is only kept because it has a significant monetary value. — Tom Storm

Actually the original is lost. Duchamp made seventeen copies in the 1960's, each of which is worth a few bob.

There are others reading, thinking, and in some cases commenting. — Fooloso4

I agree. Your disagreements interest me even if I don't have the urge to chip in. To post in a forum is to post for an audience as well as the one you're responding to.

There can be popular art, which is different from show business. In prehistoric times I wrote for tv series and there was a concept of a kind of public service among the makers - these things we are creating are about 'issues' and 'relationships' that next day the audience will talk about at the water-cooler. But we were in it for the money too, and the audience size and share; I don't think that as a partial motivation precludes art, which an earlier poster suggested.

Take cartoons: I follow Matt in the 'Daly Telegraph' even though that's not my politics because I think his stuff consistently rises to the level of popular art.

Intention is surely involved in evaluation. I feel the makers of programs like American Idol have more cynical aims, but they too want to be talked about at the water-cooler and to make money.

The irreality of reality tv is interesting to me, where people begin to behave in accordance with rules they think are 'dramatic', derived from fiction, while portraying a version of themselves - the drama often deliberately whipped up behind the scenes, or before the cameras roll. This to me is mostly spectacle, entertainment that does not aspire to art, even though an individual artist might appear there.

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' — Wayfarer

I may have mentioned to you before that I am personally taken with Jane Bennett's notion of 'vibrant matter'. This doesn't contradict scientific materialism, exactly, but it claims a vitality in all things, a 'thing power', which we generally overlook as it requires us to be highly attentive to the ecology of any situation. (I think the idea descends from Latour) Her view decenters us from the human, but also from the merely atomic, as she explores the issues for instance of 'mood' and 'atmosphere'. According to her John Hopkins website 'She is currently working on notions of a creative cosmos, in ancient Greek thought and in classical Daoist philosophies'.

The way Wittgenstein leads with Augustine in PI rubs me the wrong way. It feels like he is setting up a caricature, both with respect to Augustine's thought and with respect to the tradition which went on to develop Augustine's thought. It looks like Wittgenstein read a few sentences of Augustine's most popular work (The Confessions) and then used this (caricature) as a point of departure or foil for his own approach. — Leontiskos

This is not however how Wittgenstein regarded Augustine at all. One witness reports that Witt thought the Confessions 'the most serious book ever written'.

It's also an unusual starting point in a work of 20th century philosophy.

Wittgenstein's writing leads less to aporia than to a change in gestalt, a reconsidering of the way in which something is to be understood. — Banno

There's an interesting recent essay by Michael Campbell here which argues for a parallelism between how Wertheimer developed gestalt thinking in education - how children for example make progress by developing new structured perspectives - and Wittgenstein's approach.

Among accountants it’s particularly used in the sense of a ‘going concern’ - one that is capable of going on in business. See this .

And then you get to bring in those fun Sanskrit and Pali terms to placate it. — schopenhauer1

...although Schop himself used Greek terms some of the time, e.g. (I hope relevantly, I mainly know about Schop in relation to music not metaphysics):

the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia]. — Schopenahuer, vol 1 p.88

But that's a problem with language itself. Not using such pronouns would lead to an extremely tedious interaction with it. Even if it was used as a marketing move from the tech companies in order to mystify these models more than they are, it's still problematic to interact with something that speaks like someone with psychological issues. — Christoffer

I am raising a philosophical point, though: what sort of creature or being or machine uses the first person singular? This is not merely a practical or marketing question.

Pragmatically speaking, I don't see why 'AI' can't find a vernacular-equivalent of Wikipedia, which doesn't use the first person. The interpolation of the first person is a deliberate strategy by AI-proponents, to advance the case for it that you among others make, in particular, to induce a kind of empathy.

Our entire language is dependent on using pronouns and identity to navigate a topic, so it's hard not to anthropomorphize the AI since our language is constantly pushing us in that direction. — Christoffer

The proponents and producers of large language models do, however, encourage this anthropomorphic process. GPT-x or Google bard refer to themselves as 'I'. I've had conversations with the Bard machine about this issue but it fudged the answer as to how that can be justified. To my mind the use of the word 'I' implies a human agent, or a fiction by a human agent pretending insight into another animal's thoughts. I reject the I-ness of AI.

Casa Mila, Gaudi. Curves :)

I think you again, strongly discount what Ligotti lays out here. — schopenhauer1

Well, I should read some more Ligotti, I agree. I am reflecting mainly on my own arc through life. When I was younger, Sartre and Camus excited me; and now I am older I am still 'committed' to a residue of existentialism. Indeed I continue to think that the sort of discourse we all engage in here on a forum like this is an important kind of commitment, to rational debate amid the rise of unreasoners.

But the notion that humans face a special kind of suffering leaves me cold. People eat another chicken for dinner that has been, out of sight, tortured throughout its short helpless life and, between chews, talk to each other about their profound suffering. They exchange messages on phones made by forced labour that they don't worry about, using rare metals whose mining causes great individual suffering and political strife where it is mined. They talk about wars in other places that their leaders are financing and arming where children die daily. If there is a calculus of suffering, the older I've got, the less I've come to count a generalised human anguish as important - though I still, myself, feel it - paradox remains.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more likely that the opposite holds: that intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects. Over the centuries, many generals and industrialists have justified the sufferings of their soldiery and workforces with this sort of view - as humans have in inflicting pain on the animals they kill for food and pleasure.

Ligotti and by extension you seem to me to be yearning for Grand Meanings. Why would there be such things? For a lifelong atheist like me these sound like the mere negation of a belief in a single god, or 'the unity of science' - some craving for an over-arching sense-making whojameflip, and a sense of grievous disappointment that it isn't to be found.

Perhaps there are only small meanings, built from small things: empirical discoveries in science that suggest bigger theories, striking works of art that suggest broader ways of thinking and feeling, profound personal experiences that seem to have big ramifications.

Out of such things it turns out that humans have a propensity to suffer, yes, and also a propensity to enjoy, and a propensity to understand and to investigate, and to know, love and hate, like and be indifferent to one another. These all emerge in the small scale and create a larger picture, often clearer to me in a Shakespeare play, say, or Beethoven, or children's art about a city, or a night of folk song, than in anything 'about' philosophy. Here I find value.