mcdoodle

I agree with you that discourse about this is overblown. Scientific American talks about 'the universe' and 'reality'. These big claims are extrapolat...

I suppose I would say this sort of notion works best for me, without pseudo-philosophical trappings, when I enjoy a work of art. In the last couple of...

Consider the 'blind spot'. When a human being sees anything, their physiology means they have a blind spot in the scene, a blank which their imaginati...

Dolphins are known to use signature whistles, and to be able to mimic other dolphins' signature whistles. It seems likely that the more intelligent an...

I suppose I would say, its output demonstrates that it can have the appearance of drawing conclusions about itself. Human beings have a long history o...

If it's impossible to experience the first person experience in another, how do you know that ChatGPT has an image of itself? It certainly reproduces ...

When I was a 3-year-old, in a middle-class English suburb, I played out in the street till late-ish. That culture was more trusting than modern middle...

i can't say I yearn for high-visibility symbolic projects, though I do yearn for the lost oil riches of the 80s'. One thing we're not mentioning is th...

There is a widespread sense of disaffection where I live, out in the sticks. The prime minister has a negative approval rating. The electoral system g...

i presume this is Part 1: Part 1

At the moment, of course, autonomous vehicles aren't autonomous. Indeed, it's very expensive to fund the support staff. As a prof commented in this NY...

Consider ‘computer’. Roughly before 1950 in saying that word people would mean, a person who did computations. Roughly after that, they would mean, a ...

Power and greed and corruptible seed / seem to be all that there is... Indeed. Still an individual can sing it as they see it. And pawns can play a ga...

Aristotle thought we should care about each other, or seek to be just, in the right way at the right time for the right reasons. This is subtler and m...

Meanwhile, it seems the cops don't like it that a new tv series set in a police training college is called 'Piglets'.

I believe the Wolverine was brought back to life as a train, as meticulously recorded by Donald Fagen, in the 1970's or perhaps earlier:

Aristotle emphasises self-love in a way which is sometimes interpreted as narcissism, but that might be a modern preoccupation. If one does not love o...

If you're a panpsychist, then as a blob of matter you were already quite something, with capacity for imagination. Your experiential transformation to...

To generalise so broadly does seem to me to obscure the underdetermination involved. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measureme...

I don't think Bitbol has it right here. If you talk to physicists or biochemists, say, about their experimental work, scientists are trying to elimina...

Perhaps some poems are also your magic spells. This is by Emily Dickinson. Me from Myself -- to banish -- Had I Art -- Impregnable my Fortress Unto Al...

It seems there has been large-scale bypassing of the constraints placed on scraping material by using robots.txt. Reuters link here.

You argue that AGI will 'come into being' but will not necessarily be 'a sentient being'. How would this work?

To me this is certainly the zone where the question comes from: that life is always toppling forwards, and being curious reason-seeking animals, human...

The industrialisation of the Soviet Union, and later of Communist China, were staggering achievements. And the USSR's contribution to the defeat of Ge...

I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the nam...

The psychology literature doesn't designate a name for this phenomenon, though there's plenty of research about it. Libet called last minute changes o...

This is to conflate two different ideas in Aristotle. What's usually translated as 'function' is 'ergon', the special nature of what is named, e.g. a ...

Actually the original is lost. Duchamp made seventeen copies in the 1960's, each of which is worth a few bob.

I agree. Your disagreements interest me even if I don't have the urge to chip in. To post in a forum is to post for an audience as well as the one you...

There can be popular art, which is different from show business. In prehistoric times I wrote for tv series and there was a concept of a kind of publi...

I may have mentioned to you before that I am personally taken with Jane Bennett's notion of 'vibrant matter'. This doesn't contradict scientific mater...

This is not however how Wittgenstein regarded Augustine at all. One witness reports that Witt thought the Confessions 'the most serious book ever writ...

There's an interesting recent essay by Michael Campbell here which argues for a parallelism between how Wertheimer developed gestalt thinking in educa...

Among accountants it’s particularly used in the sense of a ‘going concern’ - one that is capable of going on in business. See this .

...although Schop himself used Greek terms some of the time, e.g. (I hope relevantly, I mainly know about Schop in relation to music not metaphysics):

I am raising a philosophical point, though: what sort of creature or being or machine uses the first person singular? This is not merely a practical o...

The proponents and producers of large language models do, however, encourage this anthropomorphic process. GPT-x or Google bard refer to themselves as...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Casa_Milà%2C_general_view.jpg Casa Mila, Gaudi. Curves :)

Well, I should read some more Ligotti, I agree. I am reflecting mainly on my own arc through life. When I was younger, Sartre and Camus excited me; an...

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more like...

Ligotti and by extension you seem to me to be yearning for Grand Meanings. Why would there be such things? For a lifelong atheist like me these sound ...

Martha Nussbaum is a highly-rated academic philosopher. I think her work is a good route in to thinking about emotion and philosophy. The Nussbaum app...

I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum's 'Emotions as judgments of value and importance'. I can't link it here but one can find a downloadable versi...

In the last election, in 2006, Hamas got 44.45% of the vote.

These are propositions I don't accept. The myth of our difference from other animals, especially the intelligent ones, is intertwined with our use and...

I don't accept that non-human animals do not deliberate. In the last couple of decades a number of writers have outlined this argument. Here's a link ...

You remark of a human absorption in flow states, like other animals': It seems odd to me to regard this as 'not natural' when you've ascribed it as be...

I stand corrected on the nature of Nynorsk.