knightoffaith

8 ms·

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by knightoffaith 2y ago
I think GP's point was specifically about science answering the questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question. (Though lacking falsifiability isn&
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples? I guess it was a long time ago for you - but maybe you have some ideas of some keywords to search up? I actually am genuinely curious. >religious apologetics Mos
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
>QM is pretty straightforward linear algebra The chasm between my grades in linear algebra and my grades in quantum begs to differ... :(
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
I would assume that GP is referring to the problem of induction. Basically, your reasoning seems to be circular.
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
It's true relativity was problematic for Kant's project (particularly re: his thought about Euclidean geometry), and you're right to point to this as an example of science informing philosophical thought. My understanding is
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by knightoffaith 2y ago
Free will is prescientific baggage? Why so? What do you think about the famously atheist Dennett's defense of free will? I think this is the kind of free will generally talk about whether laymen are around to listen or not. >implyin
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
For the interested reader, see Plato's Phaedo for more on this.
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-re
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
To be sure - God and creation being indistinguishable isn't something that Spinoza would agree with either. Two relevant items here. One is that God has an infinite number of attributes, only two of which are extension and thought (the
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
I hope someone's submitted a PR!
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Yeah, and I suppose LeCun has been talking about the power of self-supervised learning long before the rise of LLMs.
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
> I can't see how eating spinach or not has any real effect on society. Some values are more important than others, and some are even more important than facts. When you said, 'Doesn't the "rigorous approach to seekin
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Sorry for the delay. I think what you've said is generally correct in that: yes, Aquinas thinks that making a thing better is possible insofar as its accidents can be made better, but not its essence since changing its essence would ma
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
>Non-determinism is an implementation detail, not an intrinsic property, as I understand it (at least as long as you're setting temperature to zero). Right. A transformer outputs a probability distribution over all possible tokens f
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
>Not that it really matters, but if you asked people in philosophy departments, they would say the same. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4866 The majority of the surveyed subscribe to moral rea
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
In general, Spinoza and classical theists do not think God's omnipotence means he can create inconsistent worlds (e.g. he cannot create square circles); omnipotence (for them) means that God can do anything that is logically possible.
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Right - but "God creates all possible Creations" is true for Spinoza but only in the sense that for Spinoza there is only one possible creation, the one that we are living in now, so God creates the only possible creation. As
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Well, I just meant that Spinoza was a Jewish heretic, not a Christian heretic (at least, no more than say, Mohammad), since the discussion was about Christian heresies specifically. The encyclical only discusses pantheism rather than Spinoz
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
You can still do anything you want with just Python lambdas technically speaking right? Like, Python lambdas can express any lambda calculus expression, so as long as you're not writing something with side effects, you can use an arbit
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Spinoza was Jewish though.
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
>Statements of oughts are values not truths. I think values (in this context) are truths! It's an idea that seems strange at first, and I think that if you asked people on the street, they would probably say indeed that ought-stat
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
OK - let me clarify the language I've been using. (For brevity, I may speak a bit loosely with certain technical philosophical ideas here, but I'll try to avoid jargon for the most part.) I'm going to spill a good amount of i
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
If you understood Chinese, you probably wouldn't have any doubt about whether you understood Chinese or not. And it seems incredibly strange to think that only you understand Chinese and nobody else does.
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
> But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either. Isn't this like saying "if the man in the Chinese room can act like he understands Chinese and not understand Chines
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Daniel Dennett holds a view somewhat along these lines. See his famous paper, Quining Qualia: https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/qu...
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
You might be being facetious, but just in case - academic philosophers generally aren't in the business of smoking joints while talking about the meaning of life, or anything like this (even without the joint). They're generally f
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
Is it not scientific to say that X property is true of human behavior more often that it is not with statistical significance?
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
The history of science generally doesn't seem to be characterized by shifts in theory due to empirical disproofs. Usually, when theories are "disproved", we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but rather
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by knightoffaith 3y ago
>That doesn't deny the reality of instinct. Sure. But I'm not denying the reality of instinct. What I'm denying is that instinct is normative. What is natural is not necessarily what is good or what we ought to do. >You

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