@Tarskian was returning banned member @alcontali.

Also yeet (@Tarskian).

I deleted it because unexplained Starcraft analogies are not a sound basis for geopolitical discussion.

Looks great. I'm gonna read that in a nebulous soon.

hat is a perfectly legitimate theorem in PA. — Tarskian

I'm not sure about that; I'd have to think about it. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I don't think it's a theorem in PA, it's a theorem about PA. PA + some additional axiom could make cons(PA) a theorem, but that wouldn't be a theorem in raw PA.

I am curious, am I now crossing a border that Indirect Realists don't like? — Carlo Roosen

It's quite difficult to tell what your ideas' relationships are to ordinary philosophy positions.

When I talk about a duck here, without quotes, still there is no duck. — Carlo Roosen

Every variety of realist and anti-realist would agree with that, is the thing.

As a result, folk with disabilities wisely reject such naked consequentialism. — Banno

Issue seems out of thread. We should leave it.

I've read that before. IMO it's a hatchet job.

He is persona non grata in disability circles. — Banno

Yep! This is not one of them.

Singer mucked his credentials with some rubbish about disability. — Banno

I read that book (Practical Ethics). It's really not that bad. In fact the discussion uses very similar premises to the abortion argument. I found his treatment of disability actually really nuanced and profound. eg the first few pages of that book are an impassioned defence of welfare programs for the disabled and something close to a social model of disability! But that's for another thread.

Do you mean cultural relativists, postmodernists, etc.? People who think that objectivity and merit are tools of the cis white patriarchy? — fishfry

For me it's a particular set of cultural theory tropes. They're generally working in paradigms like "subtle realism", "new materialism" or the less nebulous actor network theory these days. I can't name any contemporary academic names, a couple of friends' colleagues in academia are full of that stuff, and a few old friends (grad students at the time) and their supervisors bought into that hook line and sinker.

Singer's argument for abortion being permissible is very clear cut. So long as a being has no preferences, a being who has preferences regarding the first being has their preferences take precedence arbitrarily. A woman who thus prefers to abort therefore does nothing wrong, so long as the being does not have preferences.

You will generally get people behaving as if the conceived entity has preferences, but for a long time - even after it starts looking like a human - it has no preferences. So treat it how you like.

I'd go further and claim that abortion should be sufficiently accepted and available that we see it as equivalent to the morning after pill. So long as the being has no preferences, who cares? Whatever emotional discomfort is associated with that thesis can't be distinguished from social pressure, disgust and tradition.

You could argue against the conditional statement:

so long as a being has no preferences, a being who has preferences regarding the first being has their preferences take precedence in all circumstances

But you'd be left having to argue why it's still permissible to "mistreat" rocks and plants.

You could argue that the being has preferences - but that's just false for the vast majority of time the abortion is legislated for. All of this is especially tenuous if you eat meat - what, so it's okay to kill something to eat but not to painlessly avoid diminishing a woman's pain?

All of this is ultimately about legislation and what is permissible to do, the emotional reactions of people - especially people who feel the need to have abortions, or feel strongly about the issue - should be listened to. But not at the expense of sound moral principles, scientific facts and humane laws.

The latter is what you risk when you give the moral disgust response against abortion the same level of respect as a reasoned policy. If you are listening to a friend, fine, public airing of that disgust response in a legislative context harms women's reproductive autonomy.

And I don't deny the objective component of science. iow could anyone? — fishfry

You cease believing in objective properties, that's one of the steps to the conclusion.

I resemble that remark? — fishfry

You don't. If I read your remark out of context, and didn't know your post history, I could read it that way. But I know you didn't mean it like that.

I don't think you are making your point. — fishfry

Och, I've made it. I imagine you've never had the pleasure of interacting with these people, so you're able to do the sensible thing and see "science is done by people, how could it not be a social process?" as completely separate from "2+2=4 isn't demonstrably true". Unfortunately it is often held that the fact that some practice is socially or discursively mediated undermines any truth claim in the practice. If that seems totally absurd, yes it is, but it is the attitude your comment resembles and @ssu reacted to.

I'm not imputing that set of beliefs to you. Just highlighting what that phrase could suggest if you read it from a certain angle. But I don't think that is an angle you wanted to suggest, or did suggest.

@fishfry

The annoying bit isn't recognising that stuff is discursively mediated, the annoying bit is saying that because it's discursively mediated it isn't true, or accurate, or real or whatever. The book about heroin I read made the point about medicine and ontology thusly: "there is no ontological distinction between discourse and reality" - IE, what we say about things and things.

Whereas there is such a distinction for maths objects. You can say that 2+2=5, but it isn't.

I once audited a class with an infuriating social anthropology lecturer who wrote 2+2<4 on the board. But hid he fact he was adding the left two numbers as noise sources in decibels and treating the right as a natural number. That was him, by his reckoning, demonstrating the above point. That 2+2 doesn't have to equal 4.

If you've not interacted with these people I envy you.

Is this not perfectly true? — fishfry

It's sort of true. The move also denies that eg 2+2=4 is true. It's just valid as a statement of mathematics. The medical equivalent I saw was that... I think it was heroin wasn't addictive, it was addictive in the context of current medical theory.

Who is doing these terrible things with an anodyne statement like, "Math is what mathematicians do?" And what are they doing?" — fishfry

Writing papers in social science. Though I've not seen the specific attitude for maths, I've seen the attitude recently for medicine. Medicine is what medical doctors do, thus making it a principally discursive phenomenon. About words rather than bodies.

If you go looking you can find papers on boolean logic being a colonialist abstraction. I just don't want to go searching for this brainrot again.

For that reason we invent a term, I call it fundamental reality. It is about the things we don't understand. It is perfectly fine to have a term for the collection of things we have no name for, that happens all the time. Just like "future". We can say a few things in general about fundamental reality, in the same way we can have predictions about the future. Still, both the future and fundamental reality are fundamentally unknowable. (that is the only thing these two terms have in common, it is not a full analogy) — Carlo Roosen

That's the contradiction though.

There are two ways in which we could fail to understand something like fundamental reality, the first of which is the unknown which we could come to know, the second of which is the unknown which we could not come to know. The first unknown is like the future, like what will happen tomorrow. The second unknown is like... nothing clearly statable - it's the sound of one hand clapping.

The following two are aligned with the unknown which we could come to know.

At any given time of day, the next instant is not apprehended, and in that regard the next instant could be construed as fundamentally unknowable. Even though every particular instant could be known, just not now.

Contrast that to something commonplace which we interact with and judge. We know what it is and how it works, but only approximately. Our perceptions and judgements interface imperfectly with the nature of the thing, and it is full of hidden mysteries. That object, that register of reality, is fundamentally unknowable in the sense of being inexhaustible by representation. But not beyond representation's reach.

The last three are aligned with the unknown which we could not come to know.

Contrast that to something beyond the observable universe. We know that exists, but we can't ever observe it, so it's impossible to know about it with sensors and perceptions in the same way as we would the observable universe. That construes the non-observable universe as fundamentally unknowable in one sense of knowledge, but its properties can be inferred - grasped only rationally. This unknowability marks a practical exterior to one type representation, but not a theoretical impasse to all representation.

Contrast that again to the idea that no matter what you say, it will be about something we've perceived, judged, interpreted and so on. That's the noumenon in the negative sense that you were told about previously. It marks a fundamentally unknowable exterior without giving it any positive determination. In that regard "judgements" of such an entity are not contradictions in terms, since whenever they are articulated they are secretly determinations of the aggregate of our perceptions, judgements, interpretations and so on. That exterior is... unpredicable, but extant. Only its existence is entailed by the adequacy of any of our representations, but none of its content is.

Finally contrast that again to the uninterpreted reality that exists prior to all conceptions of it, a substantive which is unintelligible. Formless, unpredicable, but structured. The true alien nature of reality in which we're all hopelessly subsumed. That kind of fundamental reality is unknowable in virtue of the failure of all of our representations to grasp it, even as it effects our minds and bodies. It is the register of Lovecraftian horror. Of the cut between the soul and materiality, that which demarcates the concept of the mind from the body without demarcating the body from the mind. An analogue of it is something like radiation post Chernobyl, an incomprehensible reality that nevertheless saturates us and determines our lives - evinced through cancer and nonsensical death. It is the idea that we already live among the "things in themselves" and their unintelligible structures and causal whimsies.

An agglomeration of all these concepts is self contradictory. While the body - the content - of any "fundamental reality" is indeterminate in at least one sense, the concepts that vouchsafe that indeterminability can contradict each other and thus require separate accounts or contextualising factors.

I don't think that is true. Fundamental reality is a concept to point to the fact that the real nature of things cannot be understood conceptually. We have words for all kind of things that we do not know, I mentioned them earlier "surprize", "future", "unknown" or "black swan", (the latter referring not to a rare animal but a special concept for an unlikely event). So it is perfectly fine to talk about fundamental reality. — Carlo Roosen

You've ended up understanding things with concepts which you've prior stipulated as being unable to understand with concepts. That is the rub. It's a contradiction, but it's a contradiction which results from your ideas rather than criticisms of them. Generally that means there's a problem with your ideas rather than the criticisms.

You can sustain an opposition by making certain moves, eg by putting the intelligible and the unintelligible in a dialectical relation, but you've not done that.

According to him the real thing we cannot understand — Carlo Roosen

Sort of. Expecting to understand the thing in itself is like expecting to be able to bake a unicycle. Personally I don't enjoy Kant's phenomenon/noumenon/thing-in-itself distinction that much, but I don't want to see it misrepresented.

I propose different terms, but they mean the same. — Carlo Roosen

The same as which though? The Kant one or the more generic representation vocabulary?

The duck only exists in fundamental reality in the sense that it gives the confirmation when you know where to look. — Carlo Roosen

That's another ambiguity though. The things in themselves do indeed exist independently of conception and judgement, and it's precisely that independence which renders them unintelligible. So your fundamental reality's existence concept is kind of the same as the conceptual reality one - which means the entities in both are of the same type, no?

why not both? — Carlo Roosen

Roughly - because the first entails that the judgement only applies to perceptions, whereas the second entails that judgement also applies to the things in themselves.

Alright. Which do you mean? Do you mean that

Ducks, in the sense of independently existing objects, aren't even "available" (scare quote) for us to call them "duck" though. in Kant though! What counts as a duck is a judgement of our perception. That's a very imprecise and inaccurate way of putting it, it's just supposed to connote that there's no "duck in itself" in Kant. — fdrake

reflects the dichotomy between fundamental reality and conceptual reality, or that

Whereas our percept of a duck can be thought of as a representation of the duck-in-itself (the duck), we might even see how long its wings are. — fdrake

reflects it?

What I am referring to, and that is what I believe Kant is referring to as well, is that when we look at a duck and call it a "duck", we have never captured its reality. — Carlo Roosen

Ducks, in the sense of independently existing objects, aren't even "available" (scare quote) for us to call them "duck" though. in Kant though! What counts as a duck is a judgement of our perception. That's a very imprecise and inaccurate way of putting it, it's just supposed to connote that there's no "duck in itself" in Kant.

Whereas our percept of a duck can be thought of as a representation of the duck-in-itself (the duck), we might even see how long its wings are.

Not a problem but I can't follow you. — Carlo Roosen

Alright. What are you struggling to understand in my post, and I'll do my best to rephrase it.

While I believe I do understand what Kant is saying, when I read it I say "yes, yes" every sentence. — Carlo Roosen

Like , I also noticed that the phenomenon/noumenon or phenomenon/thing in itself distinction is misused in your post. If you're using the more common distinction between a representation (like a painting of a duck) and represented (like a duck), your post makes more sense on those terms.

It seems to me you are addressing the problem solely through reasoning. — Carlo Roosen

I'm responding to the relations of concepts in your post by analysing them, yes. Is this a problem?

The philosophical question I am struggling with is this: I believe the conceptual reality of this AI will be completely different from ours. Is there something we can say about it? Maybe it will be closer to fundamental reality? What do you think? — Carlo Roosen

How would you tell if one conceptual reality is different from another in the first place? You seem to allow it to admit of degrees ("completely"), so similar conceptual realities ought be able to be distinguished.

Emanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism is the view that we can never know reality directly (the noumenon), we only know how it appears to us (the phenomenon). Kant made this distinction based on observation, I believe. You cannot invent such a theory out of thin air. Yet many people have wandered off in imagination, offering all kinds of abstract ideas to explain this theory. — Carlo Roosen

It's Immanuel.

I will try to bring this topic back to something everyone can validate on his/her own. I will use the terms fundamental reality and conceptual reality, simply because I get confused by Kant's terms.

I appreciate the attempt to make Kant's terms clearer. Though I think you're dealing with the more general dichotomy between representation (conceptual reality) and represented (fundamental reality). Rather than the one between phenomenon (conceptual reality, representation) and thing-in-itself or noumenon. The distinction in Kant, or pair of distinctions - between phenomenon and noumenon, or phenomenon and things-in-themselves, doesn't neatly map onto the concept of representation and represented. The things-in-themselves are alien to any conceptual apparatus or system of perception, whereas the represented can be more or less adequately grasped by a representation.

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You will agree that our conceptual detection system is at work and recognizes this as a pattern forming the letter E. Eat two cookies and now it looks like this:

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Our conceptual detection system does not wonder where the E has gone. It is now simply the letter F. Next you eat all cookies except the last one. All the letters are gone, only a single cookie is left. No big deal.

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You will likely agree that the E and F were created in your mind, as a part of your conceptual reality. Fundamental reality provided all the input for that abstraction, no misunderstanding about that. But it is the mind that recognizes the input as patterns and gives it these labels E and F.

The driving force of this paragraph is the phrase "created in your mind", which you could read substantially or relationally. Substantially, insofar as a representation (item of conceptual reality) is part of your mind while perciving the cookie configurations, or relationally insofar as the perception of the configuration results in classifying the configuration as a given letter. NB that someone who had no concept of the letters E or F would be able to see the relative positions and numbers of cookies, and you were also able to bring about a change in the represented (cookie placement) in order to elicit an expected change in our aggregate representations (letter classification). The significance of this is that you've used a representation to elicit an expected change in the un-represented by using a concept - which would be very odd if the represented is somehow beyond relation to conceptualisation as a process.

Also notice that during the time you were looking at the E and F, the concept “cookies” was most likely at the background of your mind, although you did perceive them perfectly well. Another sign that perception and concept are not the same thing.

"background of your mind" is also allegorical. You seem to be equating that with a degree of cognitive awareness of the label of the percept - being cognisant of the fact that if I see that configuration, I may assert "that configuration is E". Whereas the latter step of assertion is potentiated but not required by the classification. That matter since you would need to establish that concepts did not saturate both steps. As far as I know concepts do saturate both steps, and they do for Kant as well as contemporary accounts of perception.

Now take the remaining cookie and look at it. In the hierarchy of concepts we go one level deeper, so to speak. Look at the single cookie. For some reason it is more difficult to say that the cookie is a pattern detected in your mind by your conceptual detection system. It is a cookie, that is how it feels.

The level of description that you applied to the cookie configurations is not the level of description you would apply to the single cookie - since the cookie configuration concept requires relations between distinct cookies, and there is one. You can take a different concept - say "marks on page", "distribution of pixels" - and describe the cookie in those terms. Those concepts do not have a hierarchical dependence, since both letter cookie configurations and single cookie configurations can be described in terms of the properties of marks on a page - when one judges markings on a page, one does not need to judge letters and vice versa.

I believe there is actually no difference between the patterns E and F and a cookie. Just like the two letters, the cookie is something our brain recognizes as a separate object, searches the appropriate label for and finds the word “cookie”. All the information is out there, the recognition and labeling is only in our minds.

One type of information is out there - the spatial properties of the page marks. Whatever goes into recognising the marks as E or as F, or indeed as a letter, is a relationship between the marks and the perceiver's learning. It need not be in the page or the perceiver's mind, it can be interpreted as an element of the relation between them.

Everything that can be said about this cookie, its taste and its color, finds its origin in the reality outside, the fundamental reality. It is inside the mind where the recognition and the labeling happens, which is the conceptual reality.


You can go down more and more levels, until you are at the particle level. Do all the particles in the universe then form this "fundamental reality"? I don't think so. Observe what happens in your mind. Just like "Letters E and F" and "cookies", you now have a label "all the particles in the universe", defined by your current perspective of reality. Still just a concept in your mind, no different than the letters or the cookies.

This hasn't distinguished the fundamental reality from the lower levels of the conceptual hierarchy you stipulated - is fundamental reality at the bottom? If it's like the thing in itself, that fundamental level is unconceptualisable, so how could some concept be closer to it?

Many philosophers have been struggling with this, but this is really all there is to it, I believe. — Carlo Roosen

One reason philosophers struggle with this is that it's incredibly hard to make an account of it, given all the stuff that's going on, the biases involved in introspection, and pinning down the meaning of concepts. To be frank, the imprecisions in your key terms and relations "created in your mind", "object", "hierarchy", "conceptual", "fundamental" are what's doing the work in appearing to solve the problem. Your account is evocative but its imprecisions leave fatal gaps that ensnare it in the problems you've sought to escape.

Which isn't a bad thing, you're just among the bad company of fellow travellers.

Bah. It borrows your intentions.

The primary difference, as I see it, is that if someone uses a shite source but puts it in their own words, the person's spent a shitload of time doing something which will get easily rebuked, which incentivises engagement and reflection. You can even refute the source. In contrast chatbot output doesn't provide the source for its musings (unless you're asking it to find quotes or whatevs), and you can use it to generate screeds of quite on topic but shallow text at little time cost to its users.

Judicious use of chatbots is good. As far as I see it, you're defending responsible use of them. That's fine. Unfortunately there are plenty of instances, even on this forum, where people have not been responsible with their use. In my book I'm putting this ruling under "I'm sorry this is why we can't have unrestricted access to nice things".

If people used it like you and Pierre did exclusively, there would be little need for the ruling. And perhaps in the future people will. With the kind of use you both put it to, it does produce posts which are at least indistinguishable from human generated creativity, and perhaps are even better than what you would produce without the assistance. That's true for me in my professional life as well.

tldr: you cannot trust the generic end user to use it responsibly. I wish this were not true, but it is.

That's a good clarification. I'll add it.

Yes, but I'm certain you won't like it. :lol:

I've read a bunch of Thinking and Being now, and I'm getting the impression it was written in an alternate timeline. It seems to be responding to problems that don't exist yet but always have. I'm getting the sneaking suspicion it will be discovered in 20 years and form part of an obscure alternate continuity going from Parmenides to Aristotle to Husserl and Frege to Wittgenstein.

It's like someone forked the repository of philosophical knowledge just after the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, then merged in secondary literature in that heritage up to 2019. The set of problems and style of analysis is so obscure, but also so natural and pervasive. It looks at philosophy from an odd angle. But that makes philosophy appear as if looking at a circle from a side - a tiny strip in a space of possibilities.

I have tried a couple of times to present aspects of Kimhi's beef with the hole left by the neglect of the judgement stroke in logic in a new post. To portray the foreclosed future the abandonment of that problematic left. But I failed. I might try again once I've read more of the book.

Do you actually use LLMs to solve problems, answer questions, o — T Clark

I use it for programming. It's also okay-ish at regurgitating commonly known things which are everywhere on the internet. I use it to come up with questions sometimes for my students. And worked solutions for those questions. I'll not use it for anything I can't verify.

Edit: I've occasionally used it as a barometer for an opinion. It's pretty good at coming up with banal counterarguments to things you say, "lowest common denominator" responses. You can get it to generate alternatives like that, and it'll make ok guesses at what people will actually say in knee jerk response.

Do I interpret it correctly that we can use ChatGPT in arguments as long as we mark it as a ChatGPT reference? Like, supporting reasoning, but not as a factual source? — Christoffer

Consult with it, then write your own post. You can use it to help you write the post. You need to check what it's saying if it comes up with citations or references or whatever. You need to check what it says in the source, too. Do NOT trust its word on anything.

Behave Socratically toward it. Ask it questions. Challenge it. Ask for clarification. If you must use it for content, make your post the result of a conversation with it, and put in information you know is right.

Seed it with your own perspective etc etc.

Don't just put what someone says on the forum into it and get it to write your response. That's the kind of stuff which will eventually make us have to enforce a no-tolerance policy on it.

Thinking and Being is hard to quote from in a self contained manner, Jesus Christ.

I encourage users to flag explicit or seeming uses of chatGPT or other bots that they see. They may turn out to be fine, it just makes it easier to keep track of how it's getting used.

I amended the site guidelines with these clarifying remarks.

@Pierre-Normand - I see you use it a lot, I just wanted to tag you in thread to make sure you're aware of the ruling. While personally I think your use of it is about as good as can be hoped, it's just something to keep an eye on.

It repeats common misconceptions and flubs details constantly. It's especially bad at sourcing. It is also far too agreeable. You can easily talk it into contradicting itself, and it will do so with the air of academic aplomb regardless of what it says.

Not using it judiciously is as dangerous for someone's sense of reality as taking Reddit or Twitter posts at their word. Perhaps more so, as chatGPT is treated as an authoritative source. It should be thought of as closer to Professor Reddit, unless you keep it on a tight, tight leash.

Some clarifying remarks:

• Using it as a writing assistant is fine, using its largely unguided output as your entire post is not fine.
• Using it as a source suggester is fine, using it as a source is not fine.
• Talking about and analysing its output is fine, using it uncritically and without context is not fine.
• Do use it to simplify the language in your pre-written OP, don't use it to write an OP in response to a lazy question. eg posting the output of "Write me a forum post comparing determinism to libertarianism as viewpoints on free will" will be frowned on, but "please simplify the language I just used in writing my essay comparing libertarianism and free will" and working that output into your post is fine.

The intent of the rule is to stop people from using it to spread misinformation and from generating reams of undigested content. The intent is not to stop people from using it as a tool for enhancing creativity, for editing and standardisation of prose, or for using what it suggests when you have verified it before posting.