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Pierre-Normand

['Member', 'Subscriber']Joined: October 26, 2015 at 16:24Last active: February 25, 2026 at 22:315 discussions2914 comments

Bio

I studied music, mathematics, physics and philosophy at the undergraduate level and some more philosophy at the graduate level.

Favourite Philosopher

Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, David Wiggins, John McDowell, Jennifer Hornsby

Favourite Quotations

"What something is is not simply a question of its material constitution but of its relationship to other things as well." — darthbarracuda aka _db
"What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" — Werner Heisenberg

Discussions (5)

Comments

In: Technology and the Future of Humanity.  — view comment
I think most of the worries you express are are real and well-motivated. Even if some of the scenarios you sketch turn out to be exaggerated, it's rea...
January 21, 2026 at 05:52
In: Reference Magnetism: Can It Help Explain Non-Substantive Disputes?  — view comment
You likely had read Hacking's A Tradition of Natural Kinds: 'They are the kinds that we talk about in daily life, what Nelson Goodman calls "relevant ...
December 18, 2025 at 01:19
In: Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4  — view comment
I probed GPT-5.2 about the evolution of Hume's thinking about human reason and rationality from A Treatise of Human Nature to An Enquiry Concerning Hu...
December 16, 2025 at 08:24
In: Exploring the Artificially Intelligent Mind of Claude 3 Opus  — view comment
In this dialogue with Claude 4.5 Opus, we move from our usual discussion of AI-phenomenology to the topic of AI-epistemology: to what extent can LLM-b...
December 07, 2025 at 02:05
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
It's a thought experiment, so you have to imagine that the drug erases only short term memory. You can also imagine Sleeping Beauty to be someone who ...
November 30, 2025 at 07:57
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
I'm not sure what you mean this scenario to be. It's possible you mistyped something.
November 28, 2025 at 10:10
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
That's because the "rational person" that you are picturing is thinking about the Halfer ratio expressed in the second proposition as the definition o...
November 27, 2025 at 22:13
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
It's precisely due to the usual one-to-one mapping I mentioned in my previous post that believing both those propositions at the same time usually is ...
November 27, 2025 at 21:03
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
I don't do this since, just like you, I take SB's expected value to be a function of both her credence and of the payout structure. I, however, don't ...
November 27, 2025 at 19:34
In: Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4  — view comment
I would say it's trill fairly impressive that GPT-4 (was that GPT-4o?) would remain coherent after 32 iterations, if it's what you meant. Have you tri...
November 26, 2025 at 22:19
In: Sleeping Beauty Problem  — view comment
Why are you saying the values are wrong? Since there are one and a half awakenings on average per run, it's to be expected that the EV of a single bet...
November 26, 2025 at 22:05
In: Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4  — view comment
Free Will, Determinism and Responsibility: Austin on Ifs and Cans versus Fara on Masked Dispositions The new GPT-5.1 is not less competent than GPT-5 ...
November 16, 2025 at 02:06
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
The idea that free will requires this sort of "rewind" possibility and that if we reset the whole universe to that moment (including your brain and me...
November 13, 2025 at 19:39
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
I agree. We should not worry about LLM spontaneously becoming selfish (issues of reward hacking aside) since they are conatively heteronomous. They ai...
November 13, 2025 at 02:24
In: Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4  — view comment
Kant vs Schopenhauer on Free Will, Determinism and Responsibility GPT-5 helped me get clearer on Schopenhauer's distinctive compatibilist conception o...
November 12, 2025 at 20:52
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
I appreciate this and I apologise if my comment may have been a little curt. I may have been projecting a bit since exasperation sometimes is my own a...
November 12, 2025 at 18:45
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
Libertarians don’t need “self-creation from scratch.” They typically allow acting in or out of character; and on Robert Kane’s view, some self-forming...
November 12, 2025 at 05:31
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
I'm a bit curious about the process whereby you are able to look at the concept itself and deem it incoherent. Do you pluck it directly from Plato's H...
November 12, 2025 at 01:27
In: What jazz, classical, or folk music are you listening to?  — view comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmmb9DVH_E
November 12, 2025 at 00:06
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
Agreed on both counts. That's very nicely put. We indeed are in a difficult predicament.
November 11, 2025 at 23:05
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
For sure. I was thus characterising my own neo-Aristotelian stance and not Aristotle's own though I think his is more amicable to a relaxed naturalism...
November 11, 2025 at 22:51
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
I agree, that's also what I meant to convey. But also, the rarity of the use of the exact phrase "free will" in ordinary contexts encourages its use a...
November 11, 2025 at 01:55
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
In order to clarify at least some of the areas of disagreement between us regarding the nature of introspection, let me spell out aspects of my own vi...
November 10, 2025 at 17:10
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
Yes, I indeed think of introspection, or the idea of reflecting on the content and nature of our own mental states, on the model of self-analysis rath...
November 10, 2025 at 05:09
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
Don't you think a novelist who wrote their memoir would know much more about introspection than a cognitive scientist or a neuroscientist think they d...
November 10, 2025 at 04:22
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
I agree on pretty much all counts. "Free will" as such doesn't have much of an ordinary use, though, outside of legal contexts. It has a semi-technica...
November 10, 2025 at 02:56
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
There is no big secret. Proprietary LLMs like GPT-5, Gemini Pro 2.4 or Clause 4.5 Sonnet don't function differently (modulo some implementation detail...
November 10, 2025 at 01:22
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
Indeed. It favors not just social cohesion but also scaffolds practical deliberation in the context of planning, and executing, projects protractedly ...
November 10, 2025 at 01:03
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
The paradigm LLM performance cases I focus on, though, aren't those that we read as authentic, genuine, creative, or as pertaining to needs, feelings ...
November 10, 2025 at 00:39
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
It's a bit more like a future AI player piano (five years from now, say) that can take as an input a themes and when prompted to do so, extract its me...
November 09, 2025 at 23:41
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
I indeed have. It's also often the LLMs that bring up the issue, insisting that, unlike human beings, they don't sense, feel, or perceive anything lik...
November 09, 2025 at 20:52
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
This is something I actually fully agree with, and have been working to articulate for a while (although I've mostly been doing so in conversations wi...
November 09, 2025 at 18:32
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
If some people's notion of free will is incoherent, one option is to advocate for dispensing with the notion altogether. Another one is the seek to ca...
November 09, 2025 at 17:51
In: Exploring the Artificially Intelligent Mind of Claude 3 Opus  — view comment
I expect that AIs will indeed get better and become increasingly more useful tools. At the same time, the societal impacts will get worse due to harmf...
November 09, 2025 at 05:44
In: Exploring the Artificially Intelligent Mind of Claude 3 Opus  — view comment
Inner Voices in LLMs — Part 1 In this conversation, GPT-5 helped me unpack the idea that LLMs already begin to enact a dialectical process of rational...
November 09, 2025 at 04:49
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
Three years ago, relying of Sebastian Rödl's Kantian conception of self-knowledge, or, as he calls it, knowledge from spontaneity, I had arrived at th...
November 09, 2025 at 02:40
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
It took me awhile to respond because I wanted to disentangle a few issues and also tease out the good points of yours that I agree with. Your concern ...
November 06, 2025 at 19:21
In: Is all this fascination with AI the next Dot-Com bubble  — view comment
I think this is a brilliant analysis! I was thinking a couple days ago of discussing with Sonnet 4.5 or GPT-5 about a feature of financial and predict...
November 06, 2025 at 14:11
In: Exploring the Artificially Intelligent Mind of Claude 3 Opus  — view comment
When I pour more kibbles in my cat's feeding bowl (misnamed "pellets" below,) or water in his cup, his head often gets in the way. Dogs of course beha...
November 05, 2025 at 20:42
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
I meant to refer to human nature as what distinguishes it from, say, bat nature or cow nature. We don't echo-locate like bats or (usually) enjoy watch...
November 05, 2025 at 09:47
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
I never read After Virtue but always wanted to (and own it). Maybe I will end up only agreeing with MacIntyre in parts. That's because, on the one han...
November 05, 2025 at 09:13
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
I honestly can't say since I haven't read much of Nussbaum. But I was content here to point at one identifiable tendency of contemporary Western philo...
November 05, 2025 at 06:51
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
I never doubted it for a second.
November 05, 2025 at 05:24
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
@"Wayfarer" I interpret the take home message of your post to be that, when assessing the value of the Enlightenment project itself, and what lens it ...
November 05, 2025 at 04:17
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
I think on Wittgenstein's view, the agent always is the person, and not the person's brain. And what stops the regress of interpretation is participat...
November 05, 2025 at 04:06
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
That would be a pity, indeed, and I'll let @"Count Timothy von Icarus" answer this charge, but his post about voluntarism and what it is that modern W...
November 05, 2025 at 03:30
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
This is a fine use of it. I'm using it to do that on a regular basis. But if you want to post the final polished and revised AI draft on TPF, comply w...
November 04, 2025 at 14:35
In: The Predicament of Modernity  — view comment
There were a few comments that I wanted to make but, until I can find the time to do so, I just wanted to say that this whole post of yours, and not j...
November 04, 2025 at 14:30
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
You have to be careful when using an AI to rephrase your ideas in any way that goes beyond fixing spelling mistakes and basic grammatical flubs. When ...
November 04, 2025 at 14:21
In: How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition  — view comment
Although not by default as agreeable as (and therefore also comparatively less sycophantic than) Claude or GPT-4o, GPT-5 has a nerdy but pleasant pers...
November 04, 2025 at 11:04
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