SophistiCat

Well, like I said, the fact that AI is designed by people has little bearing on the question of its potential capabilities - at least not without spec...

Let's examine your thesis. "Conceptual" and "design" do no work here - they just point to provenance. What it boils down to is, " will never be or do ...

Where did I say that? I was just reacting to you using the example of a lone vigilante murdering an insurance exec as "the people" taking matters into...

I don't remember "the people" delegating murdering company execs to Luigi, do you?

Yes, you said this already in your opening post, and I explained why this is unworkable.

These are kind of random musings. Discussion would be more productive if you took one of these theses, thought it through, and developed in a separate...

Not sure why the question is addressed to me - did I write something about this before? Anyway, this is more of a counterexample to the point being ma...

Going from logic to metaphysics hardly clears things up. It does, if one accepts your idiosyncratic definitions of contingency and necessity (and acco...

What follows doesn't resemble your reasoning above, either: In any case, your conclusion is incorrect: Contingency and necessity are context-dependent...

Let's see... Me buying milk today was logically necessary, because I obviously did buy milk. That's not right, is it? Logic cannot imply existence or ...

Most Christians believe that most Christians are mistaken*. So what? * There are thousands of Christian denominations in the world. The largest of the...

I am not sure what you mean by fiction here. Scientific theories? Metaphysical interpretations? Illustrations, analogies, simplifications and other na...

Thanks for providing some context and examples. I am not familiar with Philipp Frank's book, but I did read Trout's Scientific explanation and the sen...

Yeah, but others haven't got the Maxim gun. That's the unstated premise underlying Bob's fascist fantasy.

Right, ignore what everyone is telling you and repeat yourself - that will work.

Who are these neo-positivist dogmatics? What are they actually saying? Well, I don't know what kind of understanding you are after. Do you have a clea...

Metaphors and analogies may help - or mislead - but I don't think they are necessary for understanding. We are capable of understanding scientific con...

Yes, that's because you never bothered to understand Ourora's point about rights. You could disagree with her, or meet her halfway by accepting her fr...

Ought implies can. The idea that all forms of government are unjust must be rejected until it can be shown (against all available evidence) that the a...

That sort of cause fits with the conventional contemporary ideas of causation, what @"Count Timothy von Icarus" refers to as granular efficient causat...

I think you overstate the limitations of our conceptual grasp. We are not locked into a fixed Kantian conceptual universe. Our minds have some flexibi...

Struggles with interpreting new and unintuitive science are not that new. Neither is the retreat to the "shut up and calculate" quietist approach. New...

The sciences with their laws represent our best understanding of nature. Our understanding can be wrong, of course (though not very wrong, as we previ...

Well, for one thing, you have "physical" all over the place. That's no clearer than "physicalism."

Being open-minded is a virtue, and most reasonable people, whether physicalists or otherwise, would say that they are - in principle - open to alterna...

A closed system can evolve through a complete cycle and end up in the same state with the same entropy, as long as there are no irreversible energy ex...

The metaphor of the empty suitcase aptly characterizes common criticisms of physicalism and materialism: they tend to load these terms with whatever b...

I am not sure what you mean by "physics is time asymmetric." There are different physical laws (why the scare quotes?), many of which are time-symmetr...

Dostoevsky can be quite funny. Acerbic, yes, but also just plain funny. Take his Village of Stepanchikovo - his take on Tartuffe (and a dig at Gogol)....

Causal analysis is pragmatically indispensable, to be sure. But pragmatics is tightly entangled with human concerns. The more one tries to objectify t...

I checked in Chrome and Firefox. I am not familiar with Brave. It's supposed to be built on the same engine as Chrome, but seeing as it is positioned ...

Cool. I am on a Latin American streak, currently reading The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso. Will look for this next.

Let's not confuse sense and reference. The point is not that a cause is a frivolous concoction, but that it doesn't map neatly onto the sensible world...

I think you misunderstood the "useful story" talk. It doesn't mean making up whatever story you like. ("Fiction" isn't helpful here, though.) In any e...

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*uAMCzjiU0K89_7He-vKFVA.jpeg Is this an impossible picture?

:up: I first read it as a teenager in translation. Reread it this year, decades later. Barnes & Noble Classics annotated e-book.

Yes, that's the key to understanding causality.

Says who? Why? What is direct causation? I couldn't make any sense of your OP - it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion. Was this ...

Agreed, the very idea of having someone else's experience seems to be incoherent. Perhaps it can be approached by atomizing experience into distinct q...

To know "what it's like" to be someone is to experience what they experience. Such experiential knowledge cannot be gained through propositional knowl...

Agreed, "my" in "my body" is indexical and could be replaced with "this body" in the same context. It would still make sense to say "I have a body," m...

Welcome, and thanks for a thoughtful post. Not much to add or disagree with, but this is a bit clumsy: No, to have something doesn't necessarily imply...

(1) Existence is not a series (of anything) (3) The universe does not have numbered "terms" (5) Does not follow

It's uncommon to see an argument with multiple premises, all of which are false.

Anthropic Principle is a particular case of an observation selection effect.

I don't think the (theological) fine-tuning argument needs such a counter, because I don't believe it works. There is a related (and somewhat controve...

Well, it was stupid to begin with, and then Tarsky (aka @"alcontali", I believe) took it to the next level.

What's bizarre is that, according to Russia's official position, Ukraine has been striking Russian territory with Western weaponry for more than a yea...

https://babelspeak.org/book/images/lu89048fqr7h_tmp_5c70c50685ab7350.jpg :rofl:

Not that I've noticed. Perhaps a psychology experiment could tease that out.