It will only think when it becomes a self-organizing system which can produce and change its own norms. No machine can do that, since the very nature of being a machine is to have its norms constructed by a human. — Joshs

:100:

Hinton's argument is basically that AI is sentient because they think like we do. People may object to this by saying animals have subjective experience and AI's don't, but this is wrong. People don't have subjective experiences.

When we say we've experienced X, we're saying that the world would have to be in state X in order for our perceptual systems to be functioning properly. This is what language use about experience means.

For more, in this video, Hinton briefly explains large language models, how AI's learn to speak, and why AI's will probably take over the world. — frank

I put this to both ChatGPT and Claude.ai, and they both said, this is eliminative materialism which fails to face up to the indubitably subjective nature of consciousness. FWIW:


https://claude.ai/chat/abdb11d6-c92c-4e36-94db-d8638f908cb1

https://chatgpt.com/share/67818b09-b100-800c-b8bf-28fe78a6e466

I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. (Mark Twain) — Bob Ross

My version of that was ‘My life has been a whole series of crises, most of which never occurred.’ A favourite saying.

Yes it seems not so clear cut as it started out. Seems there’s a genuine power struggle going on. But on list of global news stories it hardly rates considering all the other s***t going down.

Some last opportunities to enjoy a bit of righteous schadenfreude at Trump's expense. Two legal defeats today - the Supreme Court declined to prevent Justice Juan Merchan's sentencing for the Stormy Daniel's case, thereby cementing Trump's unique status as felon POTUS (albeit a 5-4 decision, his inside men would have given him the pass). And an appeals court declined to block the release of Jack Smith's report on Trump's alleged insurrection on Jan 6th 2021 (although the report on the classified documents scandal will not be released and will probably never be.)

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5077771-supreme-court-trump-sentencing/

https://thehill.com/homenews/5078198-appeals-court-denies-trump-bid-to-block-release-of-smith-jan-6-report/

Understanding Sebastian Rödl is quite challenging in its own right without such digressions. If you're interested, some references to his papers are given above.

Incidentally, that Google search for the term 'knower and known' generates in part this AI overview:

Historical context
* The idea of the knower and the known has been a philosophical problem for a long time
* The metaphysics of Descartes contributed to the modern form of this problem by separating the knower from the known
* Science has also contributed to this problem by insisting that subjective knowledge is not real knowledge

am curious if you meant to link to Gerson's article rather than Wang's with the same title. — Paine

I did intend to refer that article by Hua Wang 'The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle's D'Anima'. As I said, I found it searching for the theme 'the unity of knower and known' which as mentioned returns many articles on ancient and medieval philosophy about that theme which I think is an important subject in philosophy both East and West.

The only way for him to be correct, is if he is indeed the reincarnation of Hegel, in a literal sense. — Arcane Sandwich

I said that Rödl is like the 'current incarnation of German idealism'. 'Incarnate' means 'in the flesh'. He's representing Hegelian idealism for the current audience. That's all I meant.

A lot of material there, but then, these are online and relatively brief so probably good introductions to Rödl.

Ah yes, I recall that that review was the first thing I encountered after noticing the book title.

In respect of why there's not much mention of idealism per se - his book is not about idealism as an historical doctrine or school of philosophy. It's more focussed on demonstrating that the very structure of thought and self-consciousness entails idealism. Implicit rather than explicit, you could say.

there's a short review of Self-Consciousness & Objectivity there — J

Where?

He's not the kind of philosopher who is ever going to be easy. The wikipedia entry says, quoting the book we're discussing, 'His main influence is Hegel, and he sees himself as introducing and restating Hegel's Absolute Idealism in a historical moment that is wrought with misgivings about the merits and even the mere possibility of such a philosophy.' He's kind of an incarnation of German idealism.



(I've been doing a house-sit over the Christmas period which ends Sunday so hopefully will be able to make more headway with the text from next week.)

For Thomism matter is inscrutable and form is intelligible, and reality is a combination of the two. — Leontiskos

Which is an adaption of Aristotelian hylomorphism. I can really see the sense of that. I think it's an awareness that is overall lacking in Eastern philosophy. (I wonder if we would have templates, a concept so ubiquitous in modern manufacturing and industrial organisation, had we not had the Forms to begin with.)

The article says:

Metaphysical realism is not the same as scientific realism — Paine

I get that, but in practice they are often not differentiated.

The point of the phenomenological article I referenced is pertinent. It begins:

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.” ...

...Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.

Today's culture is inclined to view the natural attitude - call it direct realism for argument's sake - as normative, and the questioning of it an imposition on basic common sense. Whereas classical philosophy East and West understands the human condition as fundamentally imperfect or flawed - the myth of the Fall, or of Avidya/ignorance (not to be conflated, although with some common grounds.) That is even present in Heidegger's 'verfallen' albeit shorn of any religious undertone, foreshadowed by the last paragraph of that passage. But then existentialism and phenomenology recognise this, in a way that Anglo philosophy generally does not.

That part of the soul, then, which we call mind (by mind I mean that part by which the soul thinks and forms judgements) has no actual existence until it thinks. — De Anima, 429a 16, translated by W.S Hett

That really resonates with me. Mind as the unmanifest until actualised by sense-contact.

Maybe I will get Rödl’s book and find out what he makes of these texts. — Paine

Here's an earlier (and briefer) essay Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Understanding

:rofl: Not enough chess jokes in the world.

Beautiful. I was so taken by the Dickenson poem below I printed it nicely and framed it for my study. This one really speaks to me.

This World is not Conclusion
By Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond
Invisible, as Music
But positive, as Sound
It beckons, and it baffles
Philosophy, don't know
And through a Riddle, at the last
Sagacity, must go
To guess it, puzzles scholars
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies
Blushes, if any see
Plucks at a twig of Evidence
And asks a Vane, the way
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit
Strong Hallelujahs roll
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul

So I share your concern about "wisdom," and I'm not even convinced that anything I do here will have much effect in that regard. — Leontiskos

Well, I notice it. But then, I too get my fair share of blank stares. (I was amused to read something on Rupert Sheldrake's website. As you probably know, he has suggested the idea that animals and humans can detect when they're being stared at, by way of a kind of ESP - not something I'm at all convinced of - but in reference to one of the hostile reviews his book about this attracted, he headlined his response 'the sense of being glared at'. I know how he feels.)

I like Rowan Williams, will give that a listen. (I'm kind of surprised how much of Augustine's philosophical prose - not so much his doctrinal views on original sin - resonates with me. But then, I suspect a kind of anamnesis might be at work.)

I have deep reservations about Analytic philosophy, but it's difficult for me to put my finger on a precise critique. — Leontiskos

Well, that's what I'm often trying to do, apparently without much success, even though it seems quite clear to me. 'Metaphysical realism' is really just philosophy-speak for direct or naive realism, which phenomenology criticizes as 'the natural attitude' - the world just is as it seems, and if we can learn more about it, it can only be through science. By idealism I'm referring to the usual advocates - Berkeley, Kant, German idealism, and nowadays Bernardo Kastrup. I think there's a reasonably clear core of tenets, isn't there?

I was drawn to Hochschild's essay not because he is Catholic, but because I am interested in the ontology of universals. He does go into that quite deeply in that essay, discussing the 'inherence theory of predication', the fundamental importance of final causation for the 'mechanisms of meaning', and the destruction wrought by Ockham's razor on coherence of the Western metaphysic (I guess you could say he slit its throat and it bled out.) Hochschild mentions Richard Weaver's book, Ideas have Consequences. And there's another title on a similar theme, The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. Feser - I first noticed his 'The Last Superstition' and have read some of his online essays. I often quote his blog posts this being one of my favourites.

In all of this, there is an underlying theme, but I agree it is hard to see all the connections. But then, one thread running at the moment has provoked many pages of argument on the meaning of a five-word sentence. I'm a 'meaning of it all' type, not someone interested in hair-splitting minutae.

And thanks for your feedback, I will take it on board.

Further to the above (and I might have mentioned this previously), I've been most impressed with an essay called What's Wrong with Ockam? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West, Joshua Hochschild. (I encountered it on a public site which is no longer live, but is still available from academia.edu.) It is an analysis of the unexpected consequences of nominalism and the flow-on effects of the decline of Aristotelian realism in Western culture.

He quotes Richard Weaver's 'Ideas have Consequences':

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

Later, he makes the point:

...Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom.

Hochschild's closing remark is 'The fact that this loss remains so hard for us to see and to accurately explain is itself evidence of how momentous it is, and how much work of recovery we have yet to do.' Mind you, I don't expect that such a 'recovery' is at all likely, or even possible. But I least I think I have an idea of what has been lost.

What I know is that science works and built the world — Darkneos

It did? :chin:

Do you think this is possible? — Ayush Jain

No, because experience is inextricably linked with a subject or a being, and recordings are always third-person.

There was a fabulous early 1980s sci fi movie on this theme, Natalie Woods' last film before her premature and tragic death, which occurred during the final stages of filming.

I suppose I would want to understand the nemesis here a bit more clearly. What does this "mind-independence" mean, and who are its proponents? — Leontiskos

According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do. Unless this is so, metaphysical realists argue, none of our beliefs about our world could be objectively true since true beliefs tell us how things are and beliefs are objective when true or false independently of what anyone might think. — Metaphysical Realism, SEP

I think this is the attitude of a sizeable majority of contributors.

Depending on how you define idealism, Aquinas could be an idealist. — Leontiskos

That's what I'm getting at. It's often said that he was a realist philosopher, but scholastic realism is worlds away from today's scientific realism. But I'm trying to analyse it from the perspective of the history of ideas, rather than philosophy as such.

Thanks very much for your remarks, I shall peruse those sources you recommend.

Thanks. This is an idea I've been researching, and I would appreciate your
view of it.

It's often said that Aquinas was a realist, not an idealist, but his Aristotelian realism is very different from today's forms of realism, whether scientific or metaphysical. Why? Because the contemporary criterion of objectivity—the "mind independence" of justified knowledge—would have been foreign to him. Aquinas' epistemology was based on assimilation, where the knower and known are united in an intellectual act:

The Aristotelian-Thomistic account... sidesteps indirect realism/phenomenalism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes. It claims that we directly know reality because we are formally one with it. Our cognitive powers are enformed by the very same forms as their objects, yet these forms are not what we know, but the means by which we know extra-mental objects. We know things by receiving the forms of them in an immaterial way, and this reception is the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the knowing powers. — Cognition - identify/conformity

Modern Thomist philosophers are often skeptical of Kant, but by the time Kant arrived on the scene, the idea of the "mind-independent object of sense perception"—the modern criterion of objectivity—had taken hold. Berkeley's idealism was aimed squarely at rejecting this concept of mind-independent material bodies, while Kant advanced a more sophisticated transcendental idealism. His critics, however, saw the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as a reiteration of Berkeley's thesis, leading Kant to add the famous "Refutation of Idealism" in the B edition.

In Aquinas' culture, though, the notion of "mind-independence" would have seemed alien. Creation itself was understood as the expression of the Divine will, and knowledge was an act of participation in this intelligible order. Of course there are major differences: for Kant, the mind actively structures experience through categories and intuitions, while for Aquinas, the intellect passively receives forms from the world. Despite this difference, both philosophers share a commitment to explaining how the mind and world are fundamentally related—a link that modern empiricism, with its emphasis on mind-independence, tends to deprecate. This shared concern might explain why some analytical Thomists see potential in engaging with Kant's transcendental idealism, even if significant differences remain.

Could you recommend any work or scholars who explore this intersection? My own knowledge of Aquinas is fairly rudimentary, but I find this line of analysis intriguing and wonder if you see its merit.

I don't have any reason to believe that Kant is responding to Frege. — Leontiskos

No, Frege was much later than Kant and was critiquing Kant. And Frege is indeed mentioned right at the outset of Rödl’s book. Remember the title of the book is ‘an introduction to absolute idealism’. We’re not up to that yet - the quote in question is from p 55 - but the title is significant.

Again google preview https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VERMDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&redir_esc=y

:pray:

I would have thought you’d agree with:

Frege’s contention that the content of thought (<p>) can be entirely objective and independent of any particular subject.

Frege’s contention is that the content of thought (<p>) can be entirely objective and independent of any particular subject. Frege’s emphasis is on the idea that thoughts exist as abstract, objective entities in a “third realm,” independent of whether anyone thinks them. According to Frege, thoughts are, in principle, accessible to any rational being, and their validity does not depend on any individual subject’s act of thinking. Frege lays this out in a famous essay called ‘The Thought’ (in translation).

Without that background none of this makes a lot of sense.

It looks to me that Kant is saying that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations. I don't see Rödl's interpretation that <Every time p is thought, I think p is thought> — Leontiskos

Is the contention from both Kant and Rödl simply that any thought that <p> is necessarily entertained by a conscious subject? Meaning that the subject is implicit in any thought? Which is aimed at Frege’s contention that the object of thought can be entirely independent of any subject.

Incomprehension followed by profanities. True to form.

But it does more than that. Yes. there is an external reality, but no, we don’t see it as it is. That surely provides scope for philosophical analysis, doesn’t it?

I guess it's time to stop trying. — Janus

I'd agree with that. I've tried to field your many repetitive complaints in good faith for a lot of years, but it does become wearisome.

Is he an authroity? Must I agree with him? — Janus

Of course not. When I cite a source for support, it is to orient my arguments with respect to others, standard practice in debates.

You are simply wrong about this—you just don't want to admit it because it doesn't suit your narrative. — Janus

And you're what Kant describes as a transcendental realist. That is a term he uses to describe the philosophical position that treats objects of experience (phenomena) as if they exist independently of the mind and are exactly as they appear to us. In other words, a transcendental realist assumes that the world as we perceive it corresponds directly to the way the world truly is, independent of our cognitive faculties.

This is not part of 'my narrative' but a philosophical argument which you've never demonstrated a grasp of, then, having failed to understand it, at which you lob various ineffective responses. But, thanks for the target practice!

But you believe numbers are real and you believe the One Mind is real. — Janus

Hence the distinction between what exists and what is real. I said, I know it's a difficult distinction to make and that it's controversial, and that it's an heuristic rather than a theory as such, but I hope you can at least see what I'm getting at. (I think @Tom Storm does.)

For me Deacon makes too much of absentials — Janus

That's convenient for you. It happens to be central to his entire project of Incomplete Nature.

But it cannot explain the fact that we see precisely the same things in the same places at the same times. — Janus

That's because we don't. The most detailed analysis of objects is, of course, physics. And quantum physics is the most detailed form of physics. And here, it has been demonstrated that no two observations of quantum events are exactly the same for different observers. See A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. Why also I refer to Christian Fuchs and QBism - he says:

The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains.

And this is because there is an ineluctably subjective aspect to anything we perceive as real. Our minds construe the same things in the same ways because we are similar kinds of subjects, so we can arrive at inter-subjective agreement with respect to objects. Of course those objects exist, but the reality we impute to them originates with the mind, through identification, naming, apperception, etc.

existents are ideas in a universal mind in which we all participate. — Janus

That is very much the thrust of Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism, with which I'm definitely sympathetic (despite disagreement with some of his polemics). I think it's also implicit in neo-platonist philosophy. It's much nearer to what I believe to be the case, than the direct realism which holds that the world comprises individual subjects and particular objects that are all independently real.

It's more like a curse, I would argue. — Arcane Sandwich

There's no accounting for taste, especially in popular music. Some people like Neil Diamond.

We'll play AC/DC — Arcane Sandwich

'You're the Voice' would be preferable.

It is interesting that many of the folks are volunteers. I mean, that's positive. It increases the participation of the people in politics (in my opinion). — javi2541997

However, shouldn't be forgotten that voting is mandatory. When my son moved permanently to the US, he would regularly receive fine notices for not voting via our Australian address, until I pestered him to file the requisite forms and get taken off the electoral roll. Although I think mandatory voting is a good thing, overall, even though there's a certain kind of paradox to it (and Australia is not unique in that respect.)

Certainly no one here drinks Fosters — Banno

Especially with the hundreds of beer varieties on offer at virtually every suburban bottleshop.

what is the AEC sounding out staff on their availability for? Is it something related to elections? — javi2541997

that's right - all the folks who man the voting booths and conduct the ballot, many of them volunteers. The latest it can be is May 2025 but it could be April or any time before then.

number does appear in the phenomenal world—we encounter great numbers of phenomena. — Janus

Because as a rational sentient being, you can number them.

Also what does it mean to say that number, laws etc are objects of nous? Does it simply mean that they are ideas? — Janus

The point about objects of intellectual cognition such as numbers, geometric and scientific principles and the like is that while they are ideas, they are the same for all who think. They're not the property of individual minds. See in this post 'Augustine on Intelligible Objects'.

If numbers, laws etc., and all other objects are ideas in the "One Mind" then surely, they exist as such. Do you believe they stand out for the "One Mind" ? If so then they must exist for that mind, no? — Janus

There are many difficult metaphysical questions involved in this enquiry. First, I don't believe, on the same grounds that I don't believe numbers exist, that the 'One Mind' exists. It is an expression, like a figure of speech, to convey the irreducibly mental side of whatever can be considered real. Put another way, whatever is real, is real for a mind. But that mind is never an object of experience, it is only ever the subject to whom experience occurs.

(From Eriugena, "things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to exist, whereas anything that, “through the excellence of its nature,” transcends our faculties is said not to exist. According to this view, God, because of his transcendence, is said not to exist. He is described as “nothingness through excellence.” Likewise Paul Tillich 'to argue that God exists is to deny Him.')

I've started to explore the connection between the unknowable subject and Terrence Deacon's absentials. Absentials, as you will recall, are 'constitutive absences: A particular and precise missing element that is a critical defining attribute of 'ententional' phenomena, such as functions, thoughts, adaptations, purposes, and subjective experiences.'

I have often said to you that your position needs a universal mind or God in order to explain how we all experience the same world. But you always seem to pass this over and to be reluctant to posit such a mind. — Janus

Because it's a reification. To declare that such a mind exists is to make of it an object, one among others. The sense in which intelligible objects are reified into 'objects' parallels the sense in which God is reified into 'a being'. (Heidegger also makes a similar point in his distinction of seine and seiendes.)

As for how we experience the same world, I invariably reply that as we are members of the same species, language-group, culture and society, then there is a considerable stock of common experiences which we will draw on in interpreting what we see. But it's nevertheless true that different individuals all experience a unique instantiation of reality albeit converging around certain commonalities.

well, as I said, more's the pity that nuclear has been made subject to partisan politics. It's too big an issue, but I guess if Dutton looses, that will be the end of debate about it.

Splendidly put sir. They arise from our experience and interpretation of the world. See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/955313 for an excerpt from the book I mentioned.

But what we don't often hear are the ideas Joshs has proposed in more detail. — Tom Storm

I've found a book on Husserl, phenomenology and mathematics. Tough going but I think my very simple grasp of philosophy of maths can co-exist peacefully with Husserl's.

Albanese would like to distance himself from the Greens, — Banno

Regardless, I noticed last night that Hanson-Young was talking up the necessity of supporting Albanese over the Coalition. The Greens are losing voters in spades, they need to shift more towards the centre. Wouldn't be surprised to see a Labor-Greens-Teal coalition.

Interesting perspective from Pyne, although I think it presumes that Dutton is playing a kind of three-dimensional chess strategy when I'm sure his attitude was a lot more simplistic than that.

Which is why I keep mentioning Thinking Being. This book has been put online, in reality it's out of print and when available was very expensive. The online unauthorised copy is a fully bookmarked .pdf. The chapters on Parmenides and Plato are well worth the effort of reading, they will set anyone straight on the origin of the platonic forms. (This book is highly recommended by John Vervaeke, that's how I found it.)

You never answer the question so often posed to you. How could something that does not exist in space and time be real? Real in what sense? — Janus

What do you mean, 'I never answer it'? I have >23k posts on this forum, and a significant proportion are devoted to just this question. I've said already in this thread:

My heuristic, and it is only that, is that numbers, laws, etc, are real but not existent as phenomena. They do not appear amongst phenomena, but can only be discerned by the intellect (nous). So they are, in the Platonic sense, but not the Kantian, noumenal objects, object of nous. Of course, we rely on them automatically, transparently, and continuously, in the operations of discursive thought, whenever we make inferences or judgements. But the elements of those judgements do not, themselves, exist in the way that tables and chairs and Banno's beloved crockery exists. Without them, though, we could not even converse, let alone pursue philosophy. — Wayfarer

So there's my answer to it, it was the substance of my first forum post. Criticize it all you like, but don't say I haven't tried to answer the question! Which is, a distinction between what is real, and what exists, where the latter is a small sub-section of the former.

This was my first ever forum post, around 2008: