Wayfarer

The point was that the ‘kettle’ example is a clear-cut illustration of the distinction between efficient (water temp) and teleological (intentional) c...

I don't think I suggested that. I am suggesting that the notion of 'formless matter' is meaningful. From the perspective of classical philosophy, 'for...

Might be worth asking how the electrical grid is maintained in the absence of humans. LLMs don’t have, you know, hands.

So electrochemical reactions do or don’t cause us to act?

Which are immediately interpreted by the mind. There are electro-chemical constituents to be sure, but then the question of intentionality and judgeme...

Ah, ok. Makes sense!

As I brought up the mereological fallacy, I'll provide an account from a review of Bennett and Hacker, PHilosophical Foundations of Neuroscience: @"Lu...

Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all? I think in the strict sense that it is questionable. They fall under ...

They might be unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they’re reducible to, or explainable in terms of, electrochemical processes. That is precisely materi...

Not for materialists, anyway. You’re actually arguing for materialist determinism when you say that, whether you’re aware of it or not. But then, I gu...

So how does it cause a decision to act? Do chemicals also ‘decide to act’? You’ve said many times that the material universe is devoid of intention.

You’re attributing agency to neurophysiology. It’s what Hacker and Bennett call the ‘mereological fallacy’, the attribution to a part that which can o...

In the early 90’s I was an Apple Education dealer. There were many conferences animated by excitement over the supposed immense potential of multimedi...

Interesting perspective. As a regular user, I’m finding ChatGPT - I’m now on the free tier, which is still an embarrassment of riches - incredibly use...

Chilling editorial from Vox on the latest moves at OpenAI and the change of status from Not for Profit. Open AI is Dead

Here in Australia, abortion is still technically illegal in some states, but it's never enforced, and it's not nearly so much a matter of controversy ...

We're able to impose form on it by way of analysis of the chemical composition, spectroscopic analysis, etc. But in another sense, there are vast clou...

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen!

You're welcome.

I chose not to continue with the conversation because I don’t understand a lot of what you’ve written. It seems you’ve picked up on some of the ideas ...

- No further comment.

:pray:

I think that Sean Carroll perfectly exemplifies what Thompson, Gleiser and Frank designate the blind spot of science. This is, according to them, is t...

One reference point that comes to my mind is Aristotle's form (morphe) and substance (hyle). Now there's a complicating factor here, because 'hyle' - ...

That’s a book, not an argument. A synopsis would be preferable.

Do tell!

it’s the precise nature of the causal relationship that is at issue. Physicalism says it must be bottom-up, but the placebo effect mitigates against t...

Without wanting to nit pick, I don’t think that’s quite right. The stock example I’ve always read is, the answer to ‘why is the kettle boiling?’ can b...

Not at all. But reading that article - as I said, a long read - one of the points that Lewis made was that it might have been possible for FTX to have...

See this reference, under the question 'Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists'. It would be useful in future if you provided a link or refere...

Quite!

I found this note on the Wikipedia entry on Pragmatism: Close to what I believe, although I think the number is indeed embedded in the fabric of the c...

Yes, I’m exploring that way of thinking about it. It’s often said that numbers are abstract or intelligible objects, but I’ve long felt that ‘object’ ...

Not at all, a priori/a posteriori was Kant’s summary of a fundamental philosophical distinction, later called into question by Quine in his Two Dogmas...

This is an old thread, but I thought better to post this here than start a new one. Sam Bankman-Fried: A Personal Verdict (Washington Post gift link) ...

Well, ‘being’ is a verb.

I think of number as an act rather than an entity.

Traditionally, this was regarded as a distinction between a posteriori (learned through observation) and a priori (established through deduction), alt...

Construct, I think, rather than 'create', out of materials ready to hand, so to speak.

:100:

Isn’t the ‘order of reasons’ simply what it says? Something which any valid syllogism will exemplify? The book from which the Nagel essay is taken, is...

:chin:

My thoughts also. Platonism in a general philosophical sense (as distinct from specific discussion of Plato’s dialogues) upholds the reality of abstra...

The way in which we know our own being, and the way we know the existence of other objects, is different. It's the distinction between the first- and ...

One lurking factor that I've been thinking over is the change in the conception of the nature of reason over history. As David Bentley Hart puts it: T...

That observation can be made of any number of logical principles and even natural numbers themselves. My belief is that these are discovered not inven...

Thanks, by far the most considered response to that essay by any of those I've mentioned it to. He's discussing Robert Nozick's The Nature of Rational...

Sure, totally get that. It’s a very meaty essay.

How about the law of the excluded middle. Is that temporal?

Well, his 'hard problem' paper was the watershed moment. And don't loose sight of the fact that he was a bronze medallist at the Mathematics Olympiad ...