It's a nice poem and a legitimate way to think about consciousness. If you want to refer it more specifically to philosophical discussion, then I thin...
If we discover them. If not, trivially, they remain in the dark. That's almost a panpsychist claim, that everything is experience-realizing or experie...
I hope you are right, but I see reasons for skepticism. Introspection is limited, we don't know how our ideas arise, nor do we know how thoughts conne...
Yes. The irony or strange aspect about this here is that Schopenhauer does not mention much these happy moments, choosing to speak about art, which is...
Apparently, he did do quite many things that brought him joy, walking his dogs, eating sausages in a tavern, going to the theatre and listening to mus...
As far as metaphysical ideas go, his is not bad. But it has problems which you also feel. Obviously a very hard topic to talk about in general. Very c...
Of having experience yes. On being able to distinguish between willed action and mere reflex, also. On some metaphysical postulate about some blind dr...
Well, if we don't know what it is, how can we say that it is? We could be wrong. But let's be somewhat more permissive: This is tricky. It depends on ...
But physics is also appearance too, just a much more refined attempt to make sense of the data of sense. Remember physics is mathematical because it t...
They do - there is a world to which epistemology aims to establish knowledge claims of. But if we take metaphysics to mean, narrowly, the nature of th...
I've read Eddington's book, it's very good and very much readable even today. But I'd say this is more closely associated with epistemology than metap...
That's fine and you are right that the matter we have now is just extraordinarily removed from our common conceptions of it. This is true and sure; I ...
Yes. And that is an argument that can be given. I don't disagree with some varieties of idealism by the way, like Kant's, or Burthogge's or Cudworth's...
Quite. I suppose my "mitigated skepticism" always forces me to say that's the best explanation we have for now. But it could be quite wrong or it coul...
Berkeley sometimes gets a bad rap. I know very little of him, having opted for Locke and Hume instead. But if any "idealist" merits some teasing (if t...
Sure, I am agreeing that anesthesia works. We also know how to replace limbs, like arms, and get people having a hand "functioning" again, despite not...
I think Tallis is awesome, probably my favorite contemporary philosopher actually. But as with anything, he has good stuff and less good stuff. What's...
That's what many anesthesiologists say. Yes they can put people to sleep, clearly, but the mechanism by which this works is not well understood. They ...
A basic understanding yes. Some structural understanding probably. But notice that these things tell us little. For instance, an anesthesiologist can ...
That sounds good to me, I'd propose we take the ordinary usage of the word "intelligence" as the starting point. What people tend to say when they use...
It may and probably does come in degrees. However, notice, that neither you nor I have defined what "intelligence" is. I think real life problem solvi...
I don't have a good definition. Problem solving? Surviving? Doing differential calculus? Tricking people? It's very broad. I'd only be very careful in...
No, they do not. But when it comes to conceptual distinctions, such as claiming that AI is actually intelligence, that is a category error. I see no r...
We are talking about LLM's not problems with software. That's the point. You seem to think that mimicking something is the same as understanding it. W...
I can understand that. But again, why aren't we mystified by human lungs? You can make the same argument, since we can't replicate it on a computer it...
I don't think it does raise any questions about intelligence or consciousness at all. It is useful and interesting on its own merit, but people who ar...
Absolutely, such experiences very much can mark one's life and create special memories. It's tempting to say that beauty is an objective thing "out th...
LLM's become even more complex too, because if one believes that the words it uses to make sentences refer to things, then naturally some can believe ...
The issue, I see it, becomes significantly harder the more complicated a model is. If the model is about a particle, well, there's is only so much tin...
Chairs are mental constructions; they do not exist in the mind-independent world. Numbers are strange. They are discovered through our minds but seem ...
Which is fine. But why would you expect otherwise? What epistemic access do you have to compare your view to something else's? So of course, you will ...
Of course, there is no doubt, they react to things and are often happy with humans and other dogs, sometimes even with other creatures. You seem to wa...
That's interesting to me. I think conceptualization of any kind is quite remarkable, even proto-conceptualization. But language is a unique instance, ...
Ok, so we can guess that what initially gets them going is motion associated by a gesture you make which is related to "play time". Once the reach the...
True. I should have been more careful. I don't know if animals have concepts per se, maybe they have some sort of pre-conceptual awareness. But they h...
Of course, it would make sense for us we are analyzing the world through our human-centric perspective. One cannot help but see dogs chasing balls or ...
Ok, here goes: Let's minimize human attributions to animals. The dog chases something, walks through something, pisses against something, etc. What ch...
I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles. I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memor...
They very likely have some primitive concepts. I don't think it makes much sense to postulate a creature having perception absent some minimal amount ...
Yes, the claim should be trivial: reality can be (and is) conceptualized in different ways. But no to the suggestion that matter can be observed witho...
Close, but not quite what I am saying. I am saying that each animal species (ants, birds, tigers, whatever) interpret the world the way each species d...
They see something. What properties they attribute to these things we do not know. So, it doesn't make sense to say - even if you admit that they don'...
And I keep replying that we are attributing walls, trees and brick walls to animals' cognition, WALLS, TREES and BRICK are concepts, not mind-independ...
I agree than neither we, nor other animals have access to microphysical structures. We have the advantage of "seeing" them through sophisticated exper...
Fair enough, we can pick it up some other time. I still think our areas of agreement are far more interesting than those areas we disagree. Few people...
As I understand, I asked what you meant by structure you told me: "It's a general idea of form or configuration. Not qualia and shape is kind of abstr...
Who understands matter? What we have are theories of physics about matter in microphysical states. Once you enter biology, our understanding of matter...
Comments