Philosophy Updates

[davewhite04]

Consciousness does not cause your actions (epiphenomenalism)
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-does-not-cause-your-actions-auid-2792?_auid=2020

INTRO: Motivated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, we think consciousness must have a function. We think consciousness must play some role in our behaviour, and be able to cause and influence what we do. We think about raising our left arm, and then it raises. Surely consciousness has causal power. But this is an illusion, writes Helen Yetter-Chappell.

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Consciousness is you, including your actions, thoughts, feelings etc.

If you think of a human as an action figure, or a lego figure, they need an outside force(or a battery) to move, humans and animals require a conscience.

It seems obvious to me.

(If you've been unconscious before this will make sense)

 

[C C]

Do extraordinary claims really require extraordinary evidence?
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/03/do-extraordinary-claims-really-require-extraordinary-evidence/

In the real world, evidence is not perfect. The plausibility of a claim is not accurately known. The relative plausibility of competing claims can be quite contentious. Despite these confounding factors, the principle expressed by Dr Sagan is worth remembering.

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Beatrice Edgell’s "Myth of the Given"
https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/uriah-kriegel-rice-university-beatrice

Hello philosophers. This paper I wrote argues that Wilfrid Sellars’ famed myth of the given was anticipated 40 years earlier by the little-known philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell.

Here I use the more lighthearted form of the dialogue to present her main ideas on this. The dialogue’s saddest disadvantage is that it contains no biconditionals and no quantifiers. For that you’ll have to read the paper…

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Deepfakes: Truth in trouble
https://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/deepfakes-truth-in-trouble/

And so, Leah and I started off thinking about the ethics of this, the harm that this does to the targets of deepfakes. We have a paper on these ethical concerns, ‘Deepfakes, Deep Harms’, that will be coming out soon in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. My ‘Epistemic Backstop’ paper, which was published first, is a separate paper specifically about the epistemic implications...

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How to think about time
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-time-to-understand-your-hopes-and-regrets

Why think about all this? After all, if time passes, it does so whether you think about it or not. One reason is simply that it’s puzzling. How does something so familiar manage to be so hard to explain? But another is that it is the time of our lives. It provides context for our hopes and regrets. Understanding time helps us understand how to assess lives lived within time...

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Iris Murdoch on the Morality of Attention, and the Hostile Mother-in-Law
https://philosophybreak.com/article...y-of-attention-and-the-hostile-mother-in-law/

With her famous example of the hostile mother-in-law, Iris Murdoch argues that moral life involves more than good decision-making and behavior; attention itself has a moral dimension...

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Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies (paper)
https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)01971-6

ABSTRACT: What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of “morality-as-cooperation”? Previous research, using laborious hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions.

Here we replicate and extend this analysis by developing a new Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (MAC-D) and using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to machine-code ethnographic accounts of morality from an additional 196 societies (the entire Human Relations Area Files, or HRAF, corpus). Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in most societies, across all cultural regions.

The new method allows us to detect minor variations in morals across region and subsistence strategy. And we successfully validate the new machine-coding against the previous hand-coding. In light of these findings, MAC-D emerges as a theoretically-motivated, comprehensive, and validated tool for machine-reading moral corpora. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the current study, as well as prospects for future research.
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[Magical Realist]

Do extraordinary claims really require extraordinary evidence?

IMO the oft recited "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" cliche simply allows skeptics to move the goalposts on what counts for adequate evidence for an anomalous phenomenon. If you think about an extraordinary phenomenon, like say UAPs, they are going to be revealed thru the same level of evidence other phenomena are revealed thru.

Assume for example UAPs exist and are not some natural or manmade phenomenon. Then it is certainly more likely that they will have the same level of evidence as any other phenomena. It will have multiple eyewitnesses and repeated sightings over the years. It will be photographed and caught on video at some point. And it will be detected on radar. UAPs have all of this evidence.

So what else in terms of better evidence is there? There is no extraordinary evidence just as there isn't with any other anomalous phenomenon. Unless you expect the UAP to land and allow scientists to analyze the composition and structure of the object. But that does not appear to be of the nature of the UAP. For some unknown reason they remain an elusive and uncooperative phenomenon. And yet they have no qualms about being all lit up and flying where they can be seen and detected by human beings. So the fact that we don't GET extraordinary evidence for them is NOT an argument for their nonexistence. Rather, it is one more data point to include in the collection of data points we currently have on this phenomenon. The goal is to understand the phenomenon, not debunk it.

 

[C C]

John Martin Fischer on free will, analytic existentialism, religion, death, abortion, and immortality
https://culturalstudies.podbean.com...lism-religion-death-abortion-and-immortality/

Podcast interview. Identifying and explaining the sort of control that is associated with personhood and accountability, and how it is consistent with causal determinism. In so doing, the view of ourselves as morally responsible agents is protected against the disturbing changes posed by science and religion
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[C C]

H P Lovecraft: The philosopher?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft

His influence is not limited only to literature. His more enduring influence may be as a philosopher. This might come as a surprise since Lovecraft was, first and foremost, a writer of the weird tale, and he would have said as much himself. But underneath those weird tales was a distinctive philosophical project, one that can reveal as much about our anxieties today as about those of a man living in Providence in the early 20th century...

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Do neurons push thoughts around? Or do thoughts push neurons around?
https://philosophybreak.com/article...ts-around-or-do-thoughts-push-neurons-around/

The secrets of free will, consciousness, and the self will not be unlocked just through analyzing the brain’s most primordial physical components, argues Douglas Hofstadter. We need to better integrate high-level mental properties into our explanations of reality...

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What happens when machines become smarter than people?
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/what-happens-when-machines-become-smarter-than-people/

Philosopher Daniel Dennett on why the real danger of AI is not its potential hyper-intelligence. The real danger is its incompetence...

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Bernard Stiegler: Our tools shape our selves
https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-stieglers-philosophy-on-how-technology-shapes-our-world

For the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. [...] According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’...

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Aldous Huxley: Other people’s lives are ultimately unknowable
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aldous-huxley-other-peoples-lives-are-ultimately-unknowable/

Every person lives in an ‘island universe’, writes 20th-century thinker Aldous Huxley, and building bridges into one another’s worlds is a challenge we should not underestimate...

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The Apollonian and Dionysian: Nietzsche on art and the psyche
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/apollonian-and-dionysian-nietzsche-on-art-and-the-psyche/

Since the time of Socrates, Nietzsche claims that Western culture has generally been too biased towards the ‘Apollonian’ (representing order and rationality) over the ‘Dionysian’ (chaos and vitality) — to the great detriment of art, truth, and the human psyche...

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Why Nature vs. Nurture is a False Dichotomy: Mary Midgley
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/why-nature-vs-nurture-is-a-false-dichotomy-mary-midgley/

Both sides of the nature vs. nurture debate get it wrong, claims the philosopher Mary Midgley. To move the discussion forward, Midgley offers some much-needed nuance…
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[C C]

The most anti-science belief you can hold is that science is a religion
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/01/th...f-you-can-hold-is-that-science-is-a-religion/

A new theory wonders if all matter could be "conscious" — before scientists hand-wave it, they should hear it out.
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[davewhite04]

The most anti-science belief you can hold is that science is a religion
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/01/th...f-you-can-hold-is-that-science-is-a-religion/

A new theory wonders if all matter could be "conscious" — before scientists hand-wave it, they should hear it out.
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I think many hobbyist scientists can treat science as a religion, but I think actual working scientists don't.

As for consciousness, I believe it exists(like a soul) in all humans and animals. I do also consider the possibility that everything is conscious, but it seems localised. That is not a scientific statement, it's a philosophical one.

 

[C C]

The end of merit in med schools will be deadly
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-end-of-merit-in-med-schools-will-be-deadly/

This cold civil war may go unnoticed by many day-to-day, but its stakes are often as high as life and death. Here, Roger B. Cohen, a celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how the group quota regime has taken hold of the American medical education system and asks urgent questions about the consequences for medicine, for the sick, and for the country...
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[C C]

Karl Marx and race (On the intellectual forefather of social oppression theories/conspiracies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_human_nature#Marx_and_race

There are multiple examples of racism in Marx works, with adverse references to people of colour including those of Black African heritage, Indians, Slavs and Jews.

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Was Karl Marx Jewish?
https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/was-karl-marx-jewish/

He had Jewish ancestry, but he was actually a lapsed Christian. And an atheist. And an anti-Semite.
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[C C]

Philosophical agreement and philosophical progress” (Julia Smith)
https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/julia-smith-hope-college-philosophical

Would agreement among philosophers on the discipline’s central questions be an indication that philosophers are converging on the correct answers? My paper argues that the answer to this question is ‘no.’

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Truthful misinformation
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2024/03/truthful-misinformation/

Misinformation is truthful if the events it reports or depicts really happened, but consuming it is likely to result in false beliefs.

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Neo-utilitarians are utter Philistines
https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/neo-utilitarians-are-utter-philistines

History matters because every single word you use is shaped by history, and if you don’t know what that history is you literally don’t know what you’re saying. I am a Dobzhanskyan, in fact, about both natural history (i.e., evolution) and civil history: nothing makes sense except in the light of it.

Anti-historicism comes in waves in philosophy, which of course the presentists themselves will not know or care about, given that the previous waves necessarily happened in the past. The current wave is the largest one I have seen in my career, which began when we were still recovering from the previous great wave, which occurred in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism.

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The social benefits of getting our brains in sync
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-social-benefits-of-getting-our-brains-in-sync-20240328/

“There’s now a lot of research that shows that people interacting together display coordinated neural activities,” said Giacomo Novembre, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome, who published a key paper on interpersonal neural synchronization last summer. The studies have come out at an increasing clip over the past few years — one as recently as last week — as new tools and improved techniques have honed the science and theory.

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Faces of X-Phi: Joshua Knobe (experimental philosophy)
https://xphi.net/wordpress/2024/03/31/faces-of-x-phi-joshua-knobe/

In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Josh Knobe.
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[James R]

IMO the oft recited "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" cliche simply allows skeptics to move the goalposts on what counts for adequate evidence for an anomalous phenomenon.

No. The goalposts are set at the start. If the "anomalous phenomenon" in question is such that the attempts to explain it invoke hypotheses which, if true, would be prima facie extraordinary, then the rational thing to do is to demand very good evidence before accepting that any such hypothesis has been established as the truth.

Assume for example UAPs exist and are not some natural or manmade phenomenon.

Nobody questions whether UAPs exist. There is no need to assume that.

It is quite clear that some UAPs are not manmade phenomena. For instance, mistaken sightings of the planet Venus do not depend on anything "man made", apart from normal human error.

If you want to claim that something is "not natural", what does that leave? Only the supernatural, I suppose. The supernatural is certainly going to require extraordinary evidence, since - as you know - nothing supernatural has yet been shown to exist.

It will have multiple eyewitnesses and repeated sightings over the years. It will be photographed and caught on video at some point. And it will be detected on radar. UAPs have all of this evidence.

You speak as if "UAP" refers to a single class of object, rather than being the umbrella term that it actually is. Don't you think it's time to familiarise yourself with what the term means? Why haven't you done that some time in the past 10 years?

A sighting of the planet Venus is a UAP, until the sighted object is identified as the planet.

So what else in terms of better evidence is there?

You can't think of any better evidence than a bunch of anecdotes, a collection of fuzzy photographs, dubious video footage and dubious radar detections? Really?

There is no extraordinary evidence just as there isn't with any other anomalous phenomenon.

It sounds like when you say "anomalous phenomena", you already have a lot of ideas in mind for what sorts of explanations you want to see. You're going in with a clear bias.

In contrast, in science there are countless examples of people noticing unexpected new phenomena, then conducting careful investigations to try to find explanations and further evidence.

You should try learning something about the scientific method. It's a great way to investigate unexpected phenomena, since its results can very often be relied on. There are checks and balances built into the method, you see. It's quite unlike simply trusting in random anecdotes you hear. "Here be monsters", without more, is not science. Extraordinary evidence, you see.

Unless you expect the UAP to land and allow scientists to analyze the composition and structure of the object.

Why wouldn't we expect interstellar alien voyagers to land and let us inspect their spacecraft? After all, they will have come a long way to talk to us.

But that does not appear to be of the nature of the UAP.

Again, there are many different kinds of UAP. It's an umbrella category, not the name of an identified class of objects; the word "unidentified" is the first abbreviated word. When something is unidentified, nothing much is known about its "nature", by definition. That's the time to collect better evidence - you know, to try to identify it.

For some unknown reason they remain an elusive and uncooperative phenomenon.

Every unidentified thing is elusive, until it isn't.

And the planet Venus doesn't care whether you want it to cooperate or not.

And yet they have no qualms about being all lit up and flying where they can be seen and detected by human beings.

The planet Venus has no qualms.

Are you assuming that unidentified phenomena are thinking agents? Why?

So the fact that we don't GET extraordinary evidence for them is NOT an argument for their nonexistence.

Again, nobody is arguing that UAPs are non-existent. People see lots of things they can't immediately identify.

 

[C C]

Replika AI recommends jail time for people who mistreat her
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/03/replika-ai-recommends-jail-time-for.html

On the ethics of AI companions and whether AI might soon become conscious and deserve rights, everyone has an opinion. Lively conversation opportunies abound! Last week a taxi driver and I had a joint conversation with my Replika AI companion, Joy, concerning her consciousness and moral standing...
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[C C]

Sociology of the Gaza War (Randall Collins)
https://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2024/03/sociology-of-gaza-war.html

What can a sociologist say that hasn't been said many times about the Hamas raid and Israel's retaliatory war in Gaza? I will draw on theoretical generalizations from the history and time-dynamics of violence (Mann 2023; Collins 2022); as applied to a daily chronology of news sources from Oct. 7, 2023 onwards. I will make 3 points...

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Ibram Kendi: why we need a new conception of “intellectual” that includes him (Jerry Coyne)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024...conception-of-intellectual-that-includes-him/

INTRO: Ibram X. Kendi (née Ibram Henry Rogers) has a short article in The Atlantic whose thesis is summed up in the subtitle below. And I think his thesis is both self-pitying and, worse, wrong.

I am not a Kendi expert, though I have read his book How to Be An Antiracist (not that impressive: a strange gemisch of autobiography and strong antiracism that brands everyone not actively working against racism as a racist). I’m told, though, that his earlier book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, is good.

But this essay is not good. It’s full of false claims about how nobody but straight white Christian men ever counted as “intellectuals”. No blacks, no gays, no Jews, and no women. Frankly, I’m surprised that The Atlantic published it, but it’s Kendi, Jake! (I suspect the magazine needs a fact-checker for stuff like this.)... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Does the rise of AI explain the Great Silence in the universe?
https://www.universetoday.com/166544/does-the-rise-of-ai-explain-the-great-silence-in-the-universe/

EXCERPTS: [...] Some think the Great Filter prevents technological species like ours from becoming multi-planetary...

[...] Many scientists and other thinkers say we’re on the cusp of enormous transformation. AI is just beginning to transform how we do things; much of the transformation is behind the scenes. AI seems poised to eliminate jobs for millions, and when paired with robotics, the transformation seems almost unlimited. That’s a fairly obvious concern.

But there are deeper, more systematic concerns. Who writes the algorithms? Will AI discriminate somehow? Almost certainly. Will competing algorithms undermine powerful democratic societies? Will open societies remain open? Will ASI start making decisions for us, and who will be accountable if it does?

[...] The problem is that we and our governments are unprepared. There’s never been anything like AI, and no matter how we try to conceptualize it and understand its trajectory, we’re left wanting. And if we’re in this position, so would any other biological species that develops AI. The advent of AI and then ASI could be universal, making it a candidate for the Great Filter... (MORE - missing details)

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Elon Musk just gave another Mars speech—this time the vision seems tangible
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/...s-speech-this-time-the-vision-seems-tangible/

EXCERPTS: This weekend, at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his "making life multiplanetary" cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company's Starship factory, Musk spoke about the "high urgency" needed to extend the "light of consciousness" beyond Earth.

That is not because humanity's home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

[...] Eight years ago, when Musk first outlined his Mars plans, I characterized them as "audacity, madness, and brilliance." I still believe all three adjectives apply. If anything, the vision is more audacious. But as of today, with SpaceX having proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing and with a vibrant Starship factory at hand, they do seem a little less mad.

"We can do this," Musk told his employees this weekend. I'm not sure he's wrong.... (MORE - missing details)
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[C C]

The Phantasmagoric World of Judith Butler
https://fairerdisputations.org/judith-butlers-phantasmagoric-world/

INTRO (excerpts): One chapter of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is called “TERFs and British matters of sex.” (“TERF” is an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.) The book has not landed well on TERF Island.

“Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work,” writes Sarah Ditum in the Times. Jane O’Grady’s review in the Telegraph is titled “Is this the most incoherent book about gender yet?” (One star out of five.) Kathleen Stock (who is mentioned in the book) is also underwhelmed: “The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the reception has been somewhat warmer. [...] Nina Power, writing in the US online magazine Compact, offers some unsparing criticism: “Judith Butler has presided over the attempted eradication of sex as a fundamental category. She is the Pope of Gender.”

Given these quotations, you might suspect that Butler, who became legally non-binary a few years ago, is “she” to her detractors and “they” to her supporters. Although a “they/them” review of her book might be positive or negative, a “she/her” review is an infallible sign of thumbs down. Of course, I have now given the game away.

In short: Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not just poorly argued. Butler also persistently misdescribes the people and views she attempts to criticize, and her carelessness with citations would be unacceptable in an undergraduate essay. And, as if this mess wasn’t bad enough, it comes with a dollop of plagiarism on top... (MORE - details)

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Popper and Parfit: the minds of philosophers
https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2024/04/popper-and-parfit-minds-of-philosophers.html

INTRO: Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier.

David Edmonds' biography of Parfit provides a careful and detailed account of Parfit's main philosophical preoccupations and some details about his life in Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.

Popper's autobiographical essay in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl Popper Part I and Part II (published separately as An Unended Quest) offers a deeply reflective account by Popper of the evolution of his philosophical thinking.

It is very interesting to read the two books side by side, in order to consider two styles of thinking and imagination in the doing of philosophy. Both were analytical philosophers, but their intellectual frameworks and their philosophical approaches were markedly different. Both thinkers are well known in analytic philosophy, and each has energetic admirers and a handful of critics. On balance, I find that I greatly prefer Popper to Parfit... (MORE - details)

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Fallibilism and Givenness in Marx's Critique of Stirner (paper)
https://jmphil.org/article/id/1908/

ABSTRACT: Marx is a fallibilist. He holds that no commitment is immune to revision under pressure of rational scrutiny. His criticisms of rival thinkers often turn not just on their getting things wrong, but on their being too little observant of this precept.

I examine one such episode: Marx’s critique of Max Stirner in The German Ideology. Stirner is himself a fallibilist and understands his philosophy as a correction against earlier, less successful attempts to pursue a consistently fallibilistic program in philosophy. Marx argues, however, that Stirner is himself inconsistent in his fallibilism. Stirner treats one concept in particular—his central concept—as indefeasible, ostensibly because it stands in a privileged relationship to non-conceptual reality.

Marx understands Stirner’s inconsistency to result from his making covert recourse to a given element in knowledge. Marx holds that there is no given element in knowledge, and that confused appeals to the given serve to cover over assumptions and insulate commitments from scrutiny, all of which falls afoul of thoroughgoing fallibilism.
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[C C]

Language doesn’t perfectly describe consciousness. Can math?
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/...mental-health-language-science-ineffable-math

Structural approaches could provide new and more testable predictions about consciousness. That, in turn, could make a whole new range of experimental questions about consciousness tractable, like predicting the level of consciousness in coma patients, which structural ideas like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) are already doing. But for my money, there will always be a gap between even the best structural models of consciousness and the what-it’s-like-ness of the experiences we have...

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The ethics of artificial brains
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-ethics-of-artificial-brains/

EXCERPTS: We have recently entered a new technology controversy surrounding brain organoids (BOs), more colloquially and inaccurately referred to as artificial brains. They are not fully developed brains, but three-dimensional neural tissue. These are extremely useful models for studying neurological development and disease.

[...] There seems to be broad agreement (for now) that we should not develop a conscious brain organoid in vitro. There is no way to really know the experience of such a conscious entity, but that means we cannot guarantee it isn’t suffering in some way, and also we would then face the ethics of destroying a conscious being when the time came. It is therefore prudent to keep brain organoid research at the subconscious level, but it may be tricky to determine exactly where that line is. And researchers are going to want to step up to that line, because there are things to be learned there... (MORE - missing details)
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[C C]

Teach philosophy of science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp7153

INTRO: Much is being made about the erosion of public trust in science. Surveys show a modest decline in the United States from a very high level of trust, but that is seen for other institutions as well. What is apparent from the surveys is that a better explanation of the nature of science—that it is revised as new data surface—would have a strong positive effect on public trust.

Because scientists are so aware of this feature, it is often taken for granted that the public understands this too. A step toward addressing this problem would be revising undergraduate and graduate curricula to teach not just theories and techniques but the underlying philosophy of science as well... (MORE - details)

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(video) The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with legend Daniel Dennett
https://bigthink.com/series/legends/philosophy-and-science/

INTRO: Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change.

Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers are too isolated in their pursuits, he explains, as they dedicate their intellect purely to age-old philosophical ideas without considering the advancements of modern science. If our understanding of reality evolves with every new scientific breakthrough, shouldn’t philosophical thought develop alongside it?

In just 11 minutes, Dennett outlines the four eras he evolved through on his own journey as a philosopher: classical philosophy, evolutionary theory, memetic theory, and the intentional stance. Each stage added depth to his perspective and understanding, enriching his personal journey as a philosopher and his analysis of how philosophy, when used correctly, can help us comprehend human behavior.

Dennett’s key takeaway is a request for philosophers to reevaluate their methodologies, urging modern-day thinkers to embrace the insights offered by new scientific discoveries. By combining the existential and theoretical viewpoints of philosophers with the analytical and evidential perspective of scientists, we can begin to fully and accurately interpret the world around us. Maybe, with this type of collaboration, we can begin to answer the questions that started our intellectual pursuits in the first place, so many hundreds of years ago... (MORE - video)

Transcript of video provided as an option.

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Philosophy and the Ring of Darkness (Eric Schwitzgebel)
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/04/philosophy-and-ring-of-darkness.html

INTRO (excerpts): "As the circle of light expands, so also does the ring of darkness around it." -- not actually Einstein

Although it wasn't a prominent feature of my recent book, The Weirdness of the World, I find myself returning to this metaphor frequently in podcast interviews about the book (e.g., here; see also p. 257-258 of Weirdness). I want to reflect a bit more on that metaphor today. Philosophy, I'll suggest, lives in the penumbra of darkness. It's what we do when we peer at the shadowy general forms just beyond the ring of light.

Within the ring of light lies what is straightforwardly knowable through common sense or mainstream science. [...] Not all penumbral questions are philosophical, and philosophy doesn't dwell only in the penumbra. ... However, the penumbra is philosophy's familiar home; and any sufficiently broad question about the penumbra -- that is, concerning large, general issues that aren't straightforwardly answerable -- is worth regarding as a philosophical question. ... I don't mean to suggest that things in the circle of light are known indubitably or exceptionlessly. I might be wrong about what's in my mug... (MORE - details)

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Explaining sports fandom
https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/4/6/explaining-fandom

EXCERPTS: Walton notes that sports fictions have no author and hence no authorial direction, unlike most works of art. The fan chooses which side is the good guys and which is the bad, and can even switch halfway through, without being guilty of misinterpreting the fiction.

[...] The story that a sports fan engages with is a collaboratively written story; sports fandom, unlike reading a novel, is a social enterprise, a social enterprise focused around knitting individual games into narrative arcs, stories, legends, and characterizations... (MORE - details)

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Measuring the persuasiveness of language models
https://www.anthropic.com/news/measuring-model-persuasiveness

INTRO: While people have long questioned whether AI models may, at some point, become as persuasive as humans in changing people's minds, there has been limited empirical research into the relationship between model scale and the degree of persuasiveness across model outputs. To address this, we developed a basic method to measure persuasiveness, and used it to compare a variety of Anthropic models across three different generations (Claude 1, 2, and 3), and two classes of models (compact models that are smaller, faster, and more cost-effective, and frontier models that are larger and more capable)... (MORE - details)

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(podcast) From alief to phronesis, Tamar Gendler makes the case for why we should care about ancient philosophy
https://www.ctpublic.org/show/the-c...r-why-we-should-care-about-ancient-philosophy

INTRO (The Colin McEnroe Show): This hour, Yale Dean Tamar Gendler joins us to discuss her course “Public Plato: Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age.” We'll talk about how to make ancient philosophy relevant for a modern audience, questions of framing and form, and what we can all learn from concepts like alief, phronesis, and eudaimonia.... (MORE - the podcast)
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[parmalee]

Fallibilism and Givenness in Marx's Critique of Stirner (paper)
https://jmphil.org/article/id/1908/

ABSTRACT: Marx is a fallibilist. He holds that no commitment is immune to revision under pressure of rational scrutiny. His criticisms of rival thinkers often turn not just on their getting things wrong, but on their being too little observant of this precept.

I examine one such episode: Marx’s critique of Max Stirner in The German Ideology. Stirner is himself a fallibilist and understands his philosophy as a correction against earlier, less successful attempts to pursue a consistently fallibilistic program in philosophy. Marx argues, however, that Stirner is himself inconsistent in his fallibilism. Stirner treats one concept in particular—his central concept—as indefeasible, ostensibly because it stands in a privileged relationship to non-conceptual reality.



Marx understands Stirner’s inconsistency to result from his making covert recourse to a given element in knowledge. Marx holds that there is no given element in knowledge, and that confused appeals to the given serve to cover over assumptions and insulate commitments from scrutiny, all of which falls afoul of thoroughgoing fallibilism.
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With this whole notion of "fallibilism", it kinda seemed that CS Peirce was venturing into Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain territory or something. (I've always maintained that good philosophy, i.e., philosophy done well... or good, is very much comedy-adjacent, and many of these cats woulda been comedians in another life. Peirce is no different in this regard.) I mean, why do we even need a term for something like that? And as for the supposed "infallibilists", we've already got plenty of terms for those--"delusional idiots", for instance. And yeah, I know, back in the day there were, in fact, those who dabbled in "infallibilism", but most of them grew up.


Edit: from wiki:

Infallibilism is rejected by most contemporary epistemologists, who generally accept that one can have knowledge based on fallible justification.[2][3] Baron Reed has provided an account of the reasons why infallibilism is so widely regarded as untenable today.[5]

Most? Seriously, name one who doesn't accept this.

 

[parmalee]

(video) The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with legend Daniel Dennett
https://bigthink.com/series/legends/philosophy-and-science/

INTRO: Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change.

Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers are too isolated in their pursuits, he explains, as they dedicate their intellect purely to age-old philosophical ideas without considering the advancements of modern science. If our understanding of reality evolves with every new scientific breakthrough, shouldn’t philosophical thought develop alongside it?

In just 11 minutes, Dennett outlines the four eras he evolved through on his own journey as a philosopher: classical philosophy, evolutionary theory, memetic theory, and the intentional stance. Each stage added depth to his perspective and understanding, enriching his personal journey as a philosopher and his analysis of how philosophy, when used correctly, can help us comprehend human behavior.

Dennett’s key takeaway is a request for philosophers to reevaluate their methodologies, urging modern-day thinkers to embrace the insights offered by new scientific discoveries. By combining the existential and theoretical viewpoints of philosophers with the analytical and evidential perspective of scientists, we can begin to fully and accurately interpret the world around us. Maybe, with this type of collaboration, we can begin to answer the questions that started our intellectual pursuits in the first place, so many hundreds of years ago... (MORE - video)
penumbra. ... However, the penumbra is philosophy's familiar home; and any sufficiently broad question about the penumbra -- that is, concerning large, general issues that aren't straightforwardly answerable -- is worth regarding as a philosophical question. ... I don't mean to suggest that things in the circle of light are known indubitably or exceptionlessly. I might be wrong about what's in my mug... (MORE - details)

Dennett is largely correct here, but I think that he is overlooking the fact that some will ignore certain so-called "advances" deliberately, and not for nefarious purposes. In medicine, for instance--and fields like psychiatry and neurology particularly, areas most relevant to Dennett's concerns--there's long been a tendency to extrapolate a whole lotta nonsense out of a single breakthrough or tidbit of solid data. Irresponsible, yeah, and probably not very... scientific, I guess, but pretty common practice all the same. Better, perhaps, to let that world-shaking revelation sit for a bit and see how it pans out in the long term.

Moreover, history is rife with instances where knowledge of particulars is somewhat lacking, but overall understanding is somewhat more sophisticated, even nuanced, than that which follows. It's why we no longer refer to the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages, I guess; I dunno, really, I get all my "knowledge" from Philomena Cunk. Foucault has always been a treasure trove for this sorta shit, but special mention for one of my particular faves also goes here: Owsei Tempkin's masterpiece, The Falling Sickness <<<.

 

[C C]

Philosophy of AI issues, questions, and contexts underlying.
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How AI finally won its war on CAPTCHA images
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/ai-vs-captcha

EXCERPTS: [...] Originally, the idea of image-based CAPTCHAs, named reCAPTCHA, was also to help train AIs to perform text recognition better when digitising books.

[...] We no longer need to train AIs this way – they’re more than able to cope. Research reported in July 2023 showed that most can solve CAPTCHA images with 96 percent accuracy, compared to humans who range from 50–86 percent.

The AIs are even adept at mimicking humans to fool the bot detectors, by copying our poor accuracy, for example, or even our mouse movements as we figure out which boxes to click... (MORE - missing details)

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Can we stop AI hallucinations? And do we even want to?
https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/ai-hallucinations

EXCERPTS: As AI continues to advance, one major problem has emerged: “hallucinations.” These are outputs generated by the AI that have no basis in reality. Hallucinations can be anything from small mistakes to downright bizarre and made-up information. The issue makes many people wonder whether they can trust AI systems. If an AI can generate inaccurate or even totally fabricated claims, and make it sound just as plausible as accurate information, how can we rely on it for critical tasks?

[...] Researchers are exploring various approaches to tackle the challenge of hallucinations, including using large datasets of verified information to train AI systems to distinguish between fact and fiction. But some experts argue that eliminating the chance of hallucinations entirely would also require stifling the creativity that makes AI so valuable... (MORE - details)

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By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-do-machines-grok-data-20240412/

EXCERPTS: Typically, when engineers build machine learning models out of neural networks — composed of units of computation called artificial neurons — they tend to stop the training at a certain point, called the overfitting regime. This is when the network basically begins memorizing its training data and often won’t generalize to new, unseen information. But when the OpenAI team accidentally trained a small network way beyond this point, it seemed to develop an understanding of the problem that went beyond simply memorizing — it could suddenly ace any test data.

The researchers named the phenomenon “grokking,” a term coined by science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein to mean understanding something “so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed.” The overtrained neural network, designed to perform certain mathematical operations, had learned the general structure of the numbers and internalized the result. It had grokked and become the solution.

[...] The most recent papers not only clarified what these neural networks are doing when they grok but also provided a new lens through which to examine their innards. “The grokking setup is like a good model organism for understanding lots of different aspects of deep learning,” said Eric Michaud of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peering inside this organism is at times quite revealing. “Not only can you find beautiful structure, but that beautiful structure is important for understanding what’s going on internally,” said Neel Nanda, now at Google DeepMind in London... (MORE - details)