So, the paradox again arises such that I cannot trust even my own internal sense to give me information about what I am in in-itself and yet I can trust it enough to know that I am at all—seems problematic, no? — Bob Ross

Hopefully the above helps clarify why this does not resolve the paradox. Viz., if you can trust your internal sense enough to give you accurate enough information to know you exist [with representative faculties], then you necessarily can know some information about how the world really is. — Bob Ross

Absence of love isn't hate, absence of hate isn't love. — jorndoe

If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be... — SEP, Heidegger

So in that sense, it was a science but it wouldn't have been called that at the time. — Ludwig V

I would add that no clear meaning can be attributed to reality beyond our access and the the ambit of common human experience - amplified by techniques discovered or at least valdiated by science - is all there is. — Ludwig V

I have the impression that the divide (continental/analytic) was well embedded before WW2. — Ludwig V

I can perhaps moderate my rhetoric. — Ludwig V

Dennett recommends an approach he terms 'heterophenomenology' which is an attempt to combine empiricalbb science with first person reports. — Janus

I mean you can't incorporate the first person into the study of chemistry, biology, geology, botany, or even physics and so on. — Janus

I'm very ambivalent about the analytic mainstream — Ludwig V

But that doesn't mean that we have to now sort of put our heads in the sand and say, "Well let's just wait and see." We can start thinking about why is the problem as hard as it is. And what is giving rise to this systematic difficulty. — Chalmers

Thus, does it seem true that God dislikes evil; but, allowed it to exist? — Shawn

And in the universe, even that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with the evil. For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present—namely, the diseases and wounds—go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance,—the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else. — St Augustine, The Enchiridion

All dogs are animals
All animals are warm-blooded
Therefore, All dogs are warm-blooded — Leontiskos

I'm a slow reader of philosophy books. — Ludwig V

I'm not sure that "a natural tendency" and "accidental by-product" are in flat contradiction. — Ludwig V

The Claude AI response also brings up the possibility of AI evolving its own goals. While AI today lacks intrinsic desires, a sufficiently advanced AI, especially if imbued with general intelligence and reasoning capabilities, could develop goal-oriented behavior based on its programming and interactions. Yet, that behavior wouldn't necessarily resemble a biological will to survive unless it's explicitly designed to value its own continuity. AI systems might, in this case, optimize for certain objectives like efficiency, control over resources, or knowledge acquisition.

But it raises the deeper question of whether this "will" could ever arise naturally in non-biological entities. Without the evolutionary context that gives biological creatures a survival drive, it's not clear what would motivate an AI, except for objectives that we humans choose to program into them. Without user input, AI systems might develop a form of optimization, but whether that turns into something resembling the human "will" remains speculative.

Ultimately, your thought experiment strikes at the heart of whether true AI autonomy—if it ever emerges—would entail something akin to human desires, or whether AI might follow an entirely different kind of logic, detached from biological imperatives but still capable of pursuing goals. Fascinating stuff!

I'm waiting on the platform for the 5 pm train; it is 4.58; I expect (believe) that the train will arrive shortly. It doesn't. I am disappointed. Is it correct to say that I now recognize that my belief that the train will arrive shortly is false? It is correct to say that that constitutes a belief about a belief?
Why would it be incorrect to substitute "the dog" for "I" in that story? — Ludwig V

In order to acquire genuine autonomy, they'd need to be designed in a way that makes them into exemplars of artificial life rather than (mere) artificial intelligence. But this is neither necessary nor, possibly, desirable. — Pierre-Normand

I don't think that formulating the problem in such a way that the problem is insoluble is particularly helpful. — Ludwig V

, if the learning rate/adaptation success of LLMs is any indication, these new nimble robots with ChatGPT installed as a brain for calibration of movement and coordination will be doing triple back flips and walking tightropes within a few minutes right out of the box — Outlander

It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act. — Janus

I'm afraid it is very controversial. The disagreement centres on "cause". There's a definition which circulates in philosophical discussion and this definition itself is, in my view, suspect. After all, it was developed more than 300 years ago and things have moved on since then. Allied to a popular metaphysical view - that the only "true" or fundamental reality is physical/material reality, it is inescapably reductionist. — Ludwig V

Part of the problem is that the scientific revolutionaries in the 17th century took an entirely rational decision that their physics would not and could not take account of anything that could not be represented as a measurable quantity that could be treated mathematically. There's nothing wrong with that decision, except the illusion that anything that could not be represented in physics was not real. — Ludwig V

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36) — Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 35-36

Coming back to what I will call - as vaguely as possible - the neurophysiological correlates of action. The neurophysiologists are positing all sorts of mental events - at least that is the language they use - which precede action. They don't seem to allow the possibility of "simply acting" - and if they did, it would mess up their search for physical processes that precede action. — Ludwig V

Raymond Tallis coined the term "neuromania" to critique the overextension of neuroscience into domains where it may not have explanatory power. He uses the term to refer to the widespread tendency to reduce complex human experiences—such as consciousness, agency, culture, and morality—entirely to neural activity in the brain. Tallis argues that this reductionist view, which treats humans as if they are nothing more than biological machines driven by brain processes, is inadequate for capturing the richness of human existence, including our subjective experiences, social lives, and sense of meaning.

In his view, "neuromania" is part of a broader materialist trend in which the complexities of human thought and behavior are oversimplified and reduced to neuroscientific explanations. Tallis believes that this approach neglects the philosophical, cultural, and existential dimensions of human life, which cannot be fully explained by brain scans or neurochemical processes. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of understanding humans as embodied beings embedded in social and cultural contexts.

His criticism is directed at those who make claims that neuroscience can, or will soon, explain everything about what it means to be human, effectively ignoring other fields like philosophy, art, and the humanities.

I also do not believe what I am writing now is correct, or false. Thought itself is abstract, just as language. A row of letters on a screen, pixels, everything that is and is not. — Plex

IDK, this strikes me not so much as contemporary philosophy being opposed to positing God as part of an explanation as contemporary philosophy wanting to make man take the place of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how enactivism would require that forms are "artefacts of the cognitive system." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Everything you see, hear and think comes to you in structured wholes: When you read, you’re seeing a whole page even when you focus on one word or sentence. When someone speaks, you hear whole words and phrases, not individual bursts of sound. When you listen to music, you hear an ongoing melody, not just the note that is currently being played. Ongoing events enter your awareness as Gestalts, for the Gestalt is the natural unit of mental life. If you try to concentrate on a dot on this page, you will notice that you cannot help but see the context at the same time. Vision would be meaningless, and have no biological function, if people and animals saw anything less than integral scenes.

Instead of placing the inorganic under the category of efficient cause and the organic under the category of complex dynamical systems, and then trying to make the latter’s forming agency ‘ emerge’ from the former, formative agency can be accorded to the inorganic as well as the organic. — Joshs

I should add that what you’re identifying as formative capability in humans is not a passive picture of the world created by an observer, but a performative activity, a set of practices involving mind, body and environment in a dance of interaffection. Form is not our stance toward the world but a pattern of material interactions with it, in the midst of it. — Joshs

The 'transjective' refers to the dynamic, participatory relationship between the subject and the world, in which meaning arises through interaction rather than being either imposed by the subject ('in the mind') or existing outside ('in the world'). Vervaeke argues that the objective/subjective distinction presents a false dilemma because it overlooks how humans are always embedded in a web of relationships and processes within which meaning arises. The 'transjective' thus highlights the co-emergence of perception and reality, suggesting that meaning is neither purely personal nor purely external but is co-constituted through engagement with the world. And that applies to meaning in all the different senses of that word, from the utilitarian to the aesthetic, which arise along a continuum, from a spider spinning a web to a poet spinning a sonnet. — Wayfarer

What seems most misguided and retrogressive to me is the very idea that the brain is merely "grey glutinous matter". That seems most simple-minded to me. — Janus

…which amount to changing the subject… — Janus

If God does not exist, brutes also have no nature before they exist (this is especially obvious in the case of species that existed before humans, such as dinosaur species) and therefore they also ought to be free. — Jedothek

Of course they do, but we also act for reasons. As I keep trying to get you to see they are just different kinds of explanation. You might get it if you ditch your either/or thinking. — Janus

What is it we are doing when we split an observer off from an observed, and then go on to declare the observed as lacking any form in itself? — Joshs

If forms arise in the relationship between observer and observed, isn’t this also true of what supposedly lies outside of the experience of the observer? — Joshs