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Pierre-Normand

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There is an important distinction between my (and possibly yours as well) conception and standard compatibilist stances. According to standard compati...
March 10, 2025 at 09:33
When you perform an action for good reasons after having correctly deliberated about it, then your performing this action isn't something that "happen...
March 10, 2025 at 08:52
Wonderful little book. Have you also read Cancer Ward? It's equally poignant.
March 10, 2025 at 07:57
I think rational agents have the ability to determine, by means of practical deliberation, which one of several alternative possibilities will be real...
March 10, 2025 at 07:43
Excellent question! I don't believe microphysical determinism to entail universal determinism. Mental events aren't physical events, on my view, even ...
March 10, 2025 at 07:29
This issue, spelled out in more details in the short essay that you linked to in you OP, is commonly recognized in the literature on free will, determ...
March 10, 2025 at 06:42
Hebbian mechanisms contribute to explaining how object recognition skills (and reconstructive episodic memory) can be enabled by associative learning....
March 10, 2025 at 06:17
As a follow-up to the previous non-philosophical interlude, here is an improved aquarium simulation where, among other changes, you can control the mo...
March 10, 2025 at 05:51
xAI's new Grok 3 model is advertised to have a one-million-token context window. It is also free to use provided only you have an account on X/Twitter...
March 10, 2025 at 05:20
I'd like to comment but I'm a bit unclear on the nature of the connection that you wish to make between the two issues that you are raising in your OP...
March 09, 2025 at 06:27
I asked both GPT 4.5 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet what some clever or humorous replies to this question might be. None of their suggested answers were good e...
March 08, 2025 at 05:29
Non Philosophical Interlude I had Claude 3.7 Sonnet create this neat little React component displaying fish shoaling and schooling behavior. This is t...
March 04, 2025 at 13:32
OpenAI's new GPT 4.5 model feels to me like the smartest one I've interacted with so far. I was especially impressed with the way it wrapped up all th...
March 04, 2025 at 06:05
You're quite right. It also occurred to me after I posted that my broad focus on Harris's core theses in The Moral Landscape didn't do justice to the ...
March 03, 2025 at 05:24
We are indeed in broad agreement. To what extent "science" has any part in it, though, depends how we conceive of science and of its methods. The prob...
March 02, 2025 at 04:56
That doesn't make you agree with Harris, though, unless, like him, you believe the example of health and scientific medicine suggests that our knowled...
March 02, 2025 at 04:43
In The Moral Landscape Harris seeks to rationally vindicate a crude form of utilitarian/consequentialist ethics without bothering to make nary any men...
March 02, 2025 at 03:19
Ball bouncing in freely rotating hexagon — Part 2 Claude 3.7 Sonnet helped me fix some bugs and issues with the React component I had made it code ear...
March 02, 2025 at 02:03
Claude 3.7 Sonnet's Struggles and Achievements in Writing a Detective Novel—Part 3 USER: No doubt future AI systems will address the limitations of fe...
February 28, 2025 at 08:08
Follow-up to the previous post. (Note that in this discussion, I accessed GPT-4.5 through the OpenAI Playground API interface and didn't supply any sy...
February 28, 2025 at 07:45
I made to GPT-4.5 the very same query I had made to GPT-4 nearly two years ago. USER: Hi GPT4.5, Could you write a poem expressing what it feels like ...
February 28, 2025 at 06:57
OpenAI's Deep Research ('o3') Used to Generate and Essay on Free Will and Determinism Yesterday, I tried OpenAI's new 'Deep research' feature that is ...
February 28, 2025 at 02:36
After I had made Claude 3.7 Sonnet create a Mandelbrot set explorer, and before I had it create a visual representation of Braess's paradox, I had it ...
February 27, 2025 at 23:55
Yesterday, I had Claude 3.7 Sonnet generate an artifact to illustrate Braess's Paradox. (This also motivated a test for OpenAI's GPT-4.5 model that wa...
February 27, 2025 at 23:45
OpenAI released their new GPT-4.5 model today. I tested its intelligence by making it analyse the paradoxical behavior of a springs & ropes mechanical...
February 27, 2025 at 23:30
— Non-Philosophical Intermission — USER: Hi Claude, Might you be able to create a well optimized React component that displays the Mandelbrot set, wit...
February 27, 2025 at 11:16
Claude 3.7 Sonnet's Struggles and Achievements in Writing a Detective Novel—Part 2 USER: I've now finished reading your story. I've found a few incons...
February 27, 2025 at 06:51
Claude 3.7 Sonnet's Struggles and Achievements in Writing a Detective Novel—Part 1 (In the transcript below, I'll only reproduce Claude's "thinking" e...
February 27, 2025 at 06:22
In this simple Q&R, GPT-4o helps me unpack, and enriches, an intuition regarding the way in which the functions of attention layers, and other compone...
February 24, 2025 at 10:05
Nice! You prompted me to peruse the SEP entry on eliminative materialism to remind me why (and in what respects) Dennett is indeed an eliminative mate...
February 24, 2025 at 09:11
Your AI seems to have gone a bit rogue.
February 24, 2025 at 06:43
This is just one question about the exegesis of old philosophical texts, and another response by GPT-4o that blew my mind. (Have a look at this @"Wayf...
February 23, 2025 at 11:23
This is a follow-up to my earlier discussion with ChatGPT o1 regarding our characteristically human rational abilities to free ourselves (to some degr...
February 23, 2025 at 08:16
ChatGPT vs Dawkins on AI Consciousness — Part 1 A friend of mine drew my attention on a conversation Richard Dawkins has had with ChatGPT on the topic...
February 22, 2025 at 10:06
I've still not prodded Grok 3's ideological leanings, but I seldom do this with any large language model. I'm generally more interested in investigati...
February 20, 2025 at 04:28
It's because your ability to track your own beliefs, and to detect inconsistencies between them, is greatly diminished when you are asleep and dreamin...
February 20, 2025 at 01:48
(Follow-up to previous post) I got access to Grok 3 today on my free X (formerly Twitter) account. Here is my first interaction with the new model. I'...
February 20, 2025 at 00:14
My view is that you are the same person when asleep or awake, but your mental abilities and cognitive processes are very much different. Have you hear...
February 19, 2025 at 13:11
I still have an X account dating from the time when Twitter was a somewhat decent platform. There was an announcement that Grok 3 is currently rolling...
February 19, 2025 at 08:54
Getting started on new AI phenomenology experiments—misspellings and sub-token manipulations USER: Hi GPT-4o, I'd like to perform some experiments in ...
February 19, 2025 at 06:42
Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, between Kant and B. F. Skinner (and after Ernst Cassirer!) USER: Hi GPT-4o, Was Jean Piaget acquainted with and/or influ...
February 17, 2025 at 11:52
Google Gemini now has a new memory feature allowing it to refer back to past conversations. It's unfortunately only available to Google One AI Premium...
February 17, 2025 at 07:56
Maybe. Geoffrey Hinton reasonably fears the risks of rogue autonomous AI agents in the long term. For the short term, he also reasonably fears the del...
February 17, 2025 at 05:34
LLMs making use of latent cognitive abilities to perform alphabetical sorting tasks, part 3 (Link to part 1) (Link to part 2) Although this is a new c...
February 17, 2025 at 05:04
Follow-up to the previous conversation: How are LLMs prevented from "overfitting" the training data during their pre-training phase? USER: Thank you! ...
February 16, 2025 at 10:05
Trust but verify is my motto. And I'll let Roko worry about his Basilisk :wink:
February 16, 2025 at 08:02
In this conversation with ChatGPT o1, we explore a teleological perspective on how large language models (LLMs) develop emergent semantic and interpre...
February 16, 2025 at 07:51
Not much either! I only know a bit about current usage owing to being a native speaker. For more arcane questions about philology, I mostly rely on Wi...
February 16, 2025 at 07:25
I can't answer that. I don't know the history of playing cards in any details.
February 16, 2025 at 07:21
That's true. Interestingly, though, in French the four "suits" can be called "enseignes" but are more commonly called "couleurs". Hence, in the contex...
February 15, 2025 at 09:11