1. They could. I forget who this was -- LW? Sellars? I don't know -- but someone pointed out that you could write

cat
mat

for "The cat is on the mat". — Srap Tasmaner

That's Sellars. Naturalism and Ontology I think.

Oversimplified, of course, but I'm trying not to dive back in! — J

Wise.

and see what the book helps us to understand about the perennial problem of mind's special place in the world, or what Kimhi calls "the uniqueness of thinking." — J

This is just spitballing: I didn't see much new in it? A deformation of Kant? New schema of thought and content? Concretising the schematism into expression rather than making it transcendentally prior? The only touchstones I saw for his central theme of unity were Kant and Parmenides. I have no idea about the connection between that unity and oneness.

Troll summary in a nutshell: Is the like like the like that likens the unlike with the like in the like and the unlike alike?

Thinking and Being is almost impossible for me to put down and pick up while remembering what it was talking about. That's made me give up trying to make an exegesis of it, or even trying to come to an understanding of it I would believe accurate.

There are a few things I want to take away from my limited time reading the book (half of it over 3 sessions). The first is the syncategorematic/categormatic distinction. Syncategorematic expressions cannot be part of predicative judgements, categormatic expressions can be. An example of the former would be "Sally thinks ...", with an unevaluated placeholder. An example of the latter is "The cat sat upon the mat". The distinction there isn't between intensional and extensional understandings of expressions, either, it's to do with whether a given concept can be considerable as part of a predicative judgement tout court.

The idea of part of a judgement in the book is also non-truth functional. If someone thinks that P, the assertoric force associated with thinking that P is conceived of as part of thinking that P - and the force is not truth functional. In effect, one's thinking itself takes the form "thinking ("judgement-stroke ( that P )")", rather than "thinking ("that P")". I have used the quotes to denote something like "entity boundaries" (scarequotes, my term) in the state of consciousness that composes a judgement, and brackets to disambiguate parts which would correspond to propositions/declarative sentences.

Something particularly important for Kimhi is unity without dualities. To a first approximation, this is a unity of the propositional form in the judgement with the state of being which produces the judgement. It would thus be, respectively

A) neither psychological nor logical - in virtue of that unity being a composite of judgements of what is and of the mental juxtaposition of what is judged to be.
B) neither normative nor descriptive - in virtue of that unity consisting of a series of judgements of what is that may be true or false and thus not normative. Then, there are regularities of those judgements which enable them to express what is true or false in mental and practical ways. The latter in turn compels people to learn to judge in that manner, so that their expressions may be true or false.
C) neither mental nor abstract - in virtue of that the judgements are patterns of thought and enabling norms of chains of association, they are pragmatised patterns of thought.

In terms of the thread title, Kimhi definitely provides 'a challenge to Frege on assertion", but I think the thrust of the book is more properly thought of as providing a challenge to everything in the heritage of linguistic philosophy after Frege. And the nature of that challenge is to limit the relevance of extensional understandings of terms in judgements, undermine the distinction between psychologicism and logicism as responding to false problems, and try to bring the mental - in the sense of understanding the structure of concepts - back into the analysis of logical form.

So I'm going to imagine that Kimhi invites his readers to imagine what a post-Frege linguistically oriented philosophy can look like if it centred the understanding of concepts that coordinate expressions and situated expressions alongside the states which produce them.

I'm not convinced that Kimhi's approach to challenge that philosophical heritage succeeds or even produces anything particularly fecund for further explication on his terms, but I do think it raises interesting problems and (what seem to me to be) neglected associations.

I just don't know wtf to do with it honestly. After reading it I'm left wondering how I could use it to help me think about others' thoughts and expressions, and I see dubious relevance of it to my life. Other than reminding me that concepts matter, which is something I tend to believe anyway.

By the same token, a person is bodily. Here "is" does not indicate identity, but rather serves to relate a predicate to the subject, as in "Socrates is a man." — SophistiCat

I agree. The predicate "is bodily", maybe even "involves this person's body" or "is embodied" generically apply to anything the person does. But seemingly not to all things they are involved in. Compare signing a contract to being bound by it. The former is an act done with the body, the latter commits the person to specified acts in specified conditions. The former is bodily because signing is, the latter is not bodily it is institutional or social or normative.

We perhaps could even say that signing a contract does not commit a body to any specific action, just a specific type of action. You can write your signature in a variety of slightly different ways, all that matters is that you have done an act which counts as signing in the appropriate way. Even if it's the body's hand that moves, it's the person that the contract binds upon the dotted line.

In that regard, the person partakes in actions which are not individuated by their bodily movements, they are individuated by the broader context of the body and the world we're in. The body must also, therefore, be able to incorporate, act upon and modify this context and its world (in a circumscribed fashion).

If I should wish to include legal personhood, institutional roles and other social functions as part of personhood, I believe it would be necessary to say that each person is not "just" their body. But perhaps that their body has several privileged roles in determining who and how they are. It has the job of functioning in accordance with roles in other registers - social rather than ambulatory, normative rather than sensory - by coordinating itself to count as according with them.

Which is to say, a body generates its personhood but is not coextensive with it.

A similar survey of the supposed vast ranks of continental philosophers? — Banno

This isn't very fair. The distinction between the "two strands" was done for historical and political, rather than content related reasons. It was also made internally to the demographic of the analytic camp. At this point it's little more than cultural posturing for a culture that no longer exists. You find Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Gadamer, Boudrillard, Lyotard... - all the names you could ever want to namedrop - all over the humanities, in sociology, nursing, pedagogy... anything human.

No, to have something doesn't necessarily imply that the something is separate from yourself - hence why we say things like "my body" - or, for that matter, "my mind." Yes, you are a whole person, with a body, and its various parts, and a mind, and its various aspects. — SophistiCat

Also @Kurt Keefner. I'm just riffing with both of you, I don't think I really disagree with either of you, your posts were thought provoking so I wanted to share the thoughts I had.

I think that when we use phrases like "my body", it's mostly indexical, and doesn't ned to have much metaphysical import. A reference mechanism to this body, the one which is typing this post, is what "my body" is, regardless of how I otherwise conceive it.

But the phrase does enable unfortunate predications. You might want to say that you move your body, or that you have control over your body, and that kind of phrasing engenders a distinct term - a you - which somehow nevertheless has something like motor control over your body, even though motor control is some kind of part of your body, and thus not distinct from you, control and autonomy, and your body.

I am conscious and bodily to be sure, but I am not a mind or a body, and I don't have a body. — Kurt Keefner

I think this is very true. There are plenty of ways that every person is which are not just bodily or minded, even though the body and mind are involved. Anything the body does is somehow more than the body, but the body is not just a substantive part of the act - the body is not a "substance" of walking.

The person may also be identified with a role they play, irrespective of their body's nature - a barista, a lawyer, a cook. It is the person which is those things, and not the body.

I'm closing the thread since it's pseudoscience. This isn't to say you can't criticise Einstein or relativity, as @Wayfarer's reference to the Bergson/Einstein debate shows, just don't do it like this, alright?

To, the next time a poet or Hollywood foolosopher, throws a library at you, respond with a burp, a fart, or a nonchalant smile, all the while while holding your hands over your ears and shouting LALALALALA (or the chant of your preference--we're flexible on that here). — Baden

I was wondering if this was a reference to the earlier work of Roland Fartes? The casual cancellation of repression, the ecstatic joy of dodging a library, seems a reference to their most famous performance - unum cuminbum, but no longer in the for the court of kings.

There isn't anything more we can do to help you at this point @Carlo Roosen, try your best.

Since nothing yet really exists it's a bit more work than normal. — Benkei

I can imagine. I have no idea how you'd even do it in principle for complicated models.

In case that remark was too glib, if you ask someone to validate the underlying ideas in your framework exclusively experientially, you can thereby render your own ideas beyond criticism by stipulating that they can only be criticised as such. In doing that, you expect someone to "go away and think about it", without giving them a precise articulation of what they should think about. How it all hangs together.

It is quite similar to inviting you to contemplate the varying connectivity of the oscillating dynamical graph - which is a particularly vivid image I had, even though "varying", "connectivity" and "oscillating" have no meaning beyond their impression to me in that context, and "dynamical graph" is an unarticulated technical term. If I disagree with you on the basis of your ideas' contradiction of the varying connectivity of the oscillating dynamical graph, you've got no recourse while staying on topic except to inquire about my worldview. In that regard it stifles discussion, or centralises it on me and and my mysteries.

If I unpacked that term with little to no detail over a series of posts, while repeating the demand to verify the ideas experientially, it would resemble evangelism. If I spent the majority of my time on the site doing that, it would be evangelism about the varying connectivity of the oscillating dynamical graph, and I would not be respectfully engaging with my interlocutors.

Compare that to a hypothetical post in which I fully explicate my understanding of a term and situate it in an engageable context. Also compare it to a revealed spiritual edict.

If my above remark appeared rude and stifling, what I have just described is the operating principle that made it so.

Asking others to validate my ideas experientially, why does that stop discussion? — Carlo Roosen

You can validate it yourself.

Makes sense. This is what I was focussing on, though with insufficient context on my part:

- provide detailed technical documentation for the supervisory authorities and a less detailed one for users, — Benkei

There's a big distinction between technical documentation in the abstract and a procedural explanation of why an end user got the result they did. As an example, your technical documentation for something that suggests an interest rate for a loan to a user might include "elicited information is used to regularise estimates of loan default rates", but procedurally for a given user that might be "we gave you a higher than average rate because you live in an area which is poor and has lots of black people in it".

Basically, when users interact with an AI system it should be clear to them they are interacting with an AI system and if the AI makes a decision that could affect the user, for instance, it scans your paycheck to do a credit check for a loan, it should be clear it's AI doing that. — Benkei

That's a very impoverished conception of explainability. Knowing that an AI did something vs being able to know how it did it. Though it is better than the nothing.

I know. And I checked your book and your post for text matches.

Jamal gave you a conditional acceptance of the post. Your post appeared to violate the spirit of that conditional acceptance - being identical, verbatim, to the material in your website. It was subsequently restored.

To reiterate, the above has been explained to you before!

Consider the contradiction between the following statements. You were told by @Jamal:

so long as you're setting out freshly worded arguments within the posts themselves rather than just directing people to the book. — Carlo Roosen

And you were told by me:

The reason for (that thread's deletion) was because the OP contained large sections verbatim copied from your book. You later clarified that you had taken your forum post and updated the book with it — fdrake

Verbatim copying from previously published material is grounds for thread deletion because it's either plagiarism or self promotion. Seeing as your post contained large chunks of verbatim text from your site, I deleted it. Since you later clarified that you copied from the site into your book, it was restored.

The reason for this was because the OP contained large sections verbatim copied from your book. You later clarified that you had taken your forum post and updated the book with it. Thus resulting in a mod discussion and a ruling to restore the thread. This has been explained to you as well.

For what it's worth, I argued in favour of restoring it given the supplementary context you provided.

I realise you're unhappy with the mod decisions which have been made, the reason for subsequent decisions regarding the above has also been explained to you several times. I'm going to treat it as perfectly clear why you've been modded from this point onward. You've been warned!

No worries! I interpreted your OP as a request to reiterate what you'd been told, in public.

I should also have mentioned that writing principally to help you make a superintelligent AI in your basement (so to speak), skirts extremely close to pseudoscience. You're being warned and modded in general because of a combination of all these things. If your conduct on site goes against a good number of the guidelines and rules, how could you expect not to be modded for it?

Do you mean from mods or other users?

Not about that specific topic.

That would be a perfect topic for this forum, except over the years I have developed a personal philosophy that contradicts modern philosophy at its core. — Carlo Roosen

Use the concepts, explain them, engage with other users about other debates. Write OPs that present an issue in a detailed manner with open questions in it, make arguments that have a clear form.

Here I tried to make a connection with Kant, which was a bad idea because people started to correct my understanding of Kant instead of trying to read my view on the topic. — Carlo Roosen

Several people engaged charitably, in detail, and critically with your view, and not exclusively in terms of Kant. It was not a bad idea to make a connection with Kant, the way you presented some aspects of Kant's thought appeared to be common misconceptions. You can't expect people to only engage with your view on a topic, you must expect them to have their own views and try to see yourself through their perspective as well. Also note that no one complained about that particular topic, it is still on the main page.

t might be unusual and not written as another theory-on-top-of-a-theory, but it is grounded in personal validation. Not that you must take my validation as the truth, I encourage you to validate it by yourself. That is why I tell you my personal experience, to show you how you can get there. Some topics you cannot understand by thinking alone, it is that simple. Everyday topics, I am not talking about transcendental stuff. — Carlo Roosen

That is extremely close to evangelising from personal revelation. If your response to criticism is "validate my ideas experientially", rather than through conceptual analysis and dialogue, it isn't an approach that promotes discussion and criticism of your ideas. It promotes sharing your ideas without critical dialogue.

I am told to engange in other discussions. I find it difficult to do. — Carlo Roosen

The reason this is asked of you is because it would help establish that you are not solely interested in behaving like the above.

You've had this explained to you a few times now, in different ways, and I'm at a loss for how to help you understand these decisions further.

Ah, sorry. I edited the post to say it's made up. Turns out all post phenomenological social research dreck seems equally plausible eh.

AI systems must be designed and deployed with a high level of transparency, providing clear information about how they operate and their decision-making processes. Users should understand how AI influences outcomes that affect them. — Benkei

Users should or users can upon request? "Users should" sounds incredibly difficult, I've had some experience with a "users can" framework while developing scientific models which get used as part of making funding decisions for projects. Though I never wrote an official code of conduct.

I've had some experience dealing with transparency and explainability. The intuition I have is that it's mostly approached as a box ticking exercise. I think a minimal requirement for it is - being able to reproduce the exact state of the machine which produced the output which must be explained. That could be because the machine's fully deterministic given its inputs and you store the inputs from users. If you've got random bits in the code you also need to store the seeds.

For algorithms with no blackbox component - stuff which isn't like neural nets - making sure that people who develop the machine could in principle extract every mapping done to input data is a sufficient condition for (being able to develop) an explanation for why it behaved towards a user in the way it did. For neural nets the mappings are too high dimensional for even the propagation rules to be comprehensible if you rawdog them (engage with them without simplification).

If there are a small set of parameters - like model coefficients and tuning parameters - which themselves have a theoretical and practical explanation, that more than suffices for the explainability requirement on the user's end I believe. Especially if you can summarise what they mean to the user and how they went into the decision. I can provide a worked example if this is not clear - think model coefficients in a linear model and the relationship of user inputs to derived output rules from that model.

That last approach just isn't available to you if you've got a blackbox. My knowledge here is 3 years out of date, but I remember trying to find citable statistics of the above form for neural network output. My impression from the literature was that there was no consensus regarding if this was in principle possible, and the bleeding edge for neural network explainability were metamodelling approaches, shoehorning in relatively explainable things through assessing their predictions in constrained scenarios and coming up with summary characteristics of the above form.

I think the above constrained predictive experiments were how you can conclude things like the resume bias for manly man language. The paper "Discriminating Systems" is great on this, if you've not read it, but it doesn't go into the maths detail much.

3. biometric categorisation systems that categorise individually natural persons based on their biometric data to deduce or infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, or sexual orientation, except for uses in the area of law enforcement; — Benkei

The language on that one might be a bit difficult to pin down. If you end up collecting data at scale, especially if there's a demographic component, you end up with something that can be predictive about that protected data. Especially if you're collecting user telemetry from a mobile app.

All AI-generated data should be extensively tested and reviewed for accuracy before actual use or distribution. Proper oversight of AI outputs includes evaluating for potential bias, discrimination, inaccuracies, or misuse. The data generated should be auditable and traceable through every stage of its development. — Benkei

To prevent that being a box ticking exercise, making sure that there are predefined steps for the assessment of any given tool seems like it's required.

Human oversight is critical to ensuring the ethical application of AI. Ethical AI prioritizes doing no harm by protecting intellectual property, safeguarding privacy, promoting responsible and respectful use, and preventing bias, discrimination, and inaccuracies. It also ensures accountability, responsibility, and transparency, aligning with core principles of ethical conduct. — Benkei

That one is hard to make sufficiently precise, I imagine, I am remembering discussions at my old workplace regarding "if we require output to be ethical and explainable and well sourced, how the hell can we use google or public code repositories in development, even when they're necessary?".

Oh no worries I made all that shit up.

The relevance of this discussion to anything but piles and pales has concluded. I will close the thread.

Can I borrow your Anusol please?

I like and respect you and I’m tired of barking at you. — T Clark

Same. The thread remains open, should you decide to bark more.

Agreed, but it wasn't beyond the pale here on the forum. — T Clark

There has to be a line. This was across it.

That's not what I said. I said that it is inappropriate for moderators to threaten posters in public. — T Clark

I know it wasn't exactly what you said. I wanted to raise that point because the discussion you and I are having could be read in a similar vein.

Because his posts and discussions are within the bounds that are usually allowed here on the forum. — T Clark

Details regarding general conduct: the first is that Carlo joined very recently and since then has made many threads, all of which discuss his idiosyncratic worldview with his own largely unarticulated technical terms. The worldview hitherto expressed has few touchstones with any form of academic philosophy, and a couple of touchstones with pseudoscience which could get it deleted - people claiming to develop superintelligent general artificial intelligences. Moreover, Carlo has exclusively talked about this with other forum members and has shown little to no intention to engage with other members otherwise.

It's a mixture of the content quality, the content's lack of overlap with academic philosophy or common philosophy discussions, the style of engagement, the frequency of thread creation and the singularity of interest in one's own already written work.

All of those things skirt the rules individually. Compare evangelism, quality, spam, tone and self promotion. They rarely occur together. Hopefully that makes sense.

You seem to be rejecting the use of introspection as a mode of studying the mind. — T Clark

Naw, it's why I wrote "on that basis alone". We have plenty of similar-ish threads, as you say. Phenomenology uses introspection as well and that's super duper philosophical.

I don't know why Carlo Roosen is being singled out. — T Clark

What makes you believe Carlo is? It is entirely possible that I'm acting inconsistently, so I'd like to know what you think. Please bear in mind that this discussion is public, given your prior comment expressing discomfort regarding public airing of related issues.

Personal reflection on your own thoughts and experiences is not, on that basis alone, philosophy of mind. It is conversational in tone and almost devoid of philosophical content. Hence, lounge.

Closing this now. It will stay stickied for a bit.

the medium is the massage — kazan

Yes. It's from the popular work Loving Hands Are Everywhere: Deferred Touch and the Public Eye, it makes a case that human sensory faculties are dispersed through space and technology through interfaces - phones, computers, doors - and so the principal metaphor for perception and comportment should be tactile rather than visual.

The phrase "the medium is the massage" is the title of the second chapter in that book, a discussion which draws heavily from the notion that touch subjectivises everyone involved an a mingling of sensations. The medium, being our social spaces, are absolutely saturated by signs and thresholds - places we need to get access to. Doors for work, our apartment complex etc. And it makes the point that the distribution of this touch based subjectivising - who counts as a subject and when - is determined by who has the social power to determine access through these interfaces.

Principally, however, that social power is diffuse like an institution's is. Not determined by particular individuals in it. And a massage is conceived of as having an active agent (the masseuse) and a passive agent (the customer). The quote "the medium is the massage" thus connotes the concentration of this subjectivising power along the lines of social power by using the direction of agency in massage, and also that a massage is a medium of touch.

Edit: (I made this up)

Closed for necroposting. Jesus 9 years.

I started reading Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) by Marshall McLuhan today. It has an eerie prescience.

I learned that it is the origin of the popular phrase "the medium is the message" - which is somewhat old at this point, but the more recent meme phrase "human beings are the sex organs of the machine world" is also from this book!