Philosophical thoughts from an unapologetic contrarian
Prompted by Keith Frankish's recent streamed discussion of LLM intentionality on YouTube , there's a particular idea I wanted to share which I'm not sure is widely enough appreciated but which I think gives a valuable perspective from which to think about LLMs and what kinds of intentions they may have. This is not an original idea of my own -- at least some of my thinking on this was sparked by…
I wanted to write about the argument from psychophysical harmony against naturalism, even though it has no force for those like me who think that talk of qualia and phenomenality in general is confused. For the argument to make any sense at all, we will first have to assume that such considerations as the Knowledge Argument (i.e. the Mary's Room thought experiment from Frank Jackson) have…
I wanted to give a quick take on a thought experiment that has been doing the rounds on Twitter lately. I thought I had heard all the consciousness thought experiments but at #cshlNeuroAI @LibedinskyLab told me a new one that literally kept me up last night. This is Camilo’s idea but I’ve taken some liberties with the details. Answer the polls in the order that you read them. 1/ — Dr. Anna…
In this post I will discuss whether the idea of strong emergence can help us to make sense of free will and a few related issues. These ideas have been on my mind lately largely due to the above discussion, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Background (You may want to skim or skip this bit if you're familiar with the terms weak and strong emergence, libertarian free will,…
Many of you would be aware already of illusionism, if in fact there were many readers of this blog. But in case it's needed, illusionism, exemplified by Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett, is an approach to the philosophy of consciousness which claims that qualia (the ineffable irreducible feelings associated with conscious experience, e.g. the redness of red), are entirely illusory and do not…
Is the brain actually a computer? Or is this a metaphor or analogy which is often taken too literally? This issue has come up a few times in the past couple of years, and I wanted to give my take because some common responses do not seem right to me. I'm going to argue the brain really is literally a computer and that this is not a metaphor or analogy at all. Many of the experts who disagree with…
Warning: this post will only make sense to anyone who has read my last two posts. I may take it down after a while as it's more of a reference to keep track of an ongoing discussion. I've been playing a bit of analogy tennis with Philip Goff and Keith Frankish on twitter. You know how it goes, one person provides an analogy to explain their way of thinking, then another person proposes an…
Philip Goff To follow on from my previous post, Philip Goff has now released a preview of an academic paper in progress on this topic. Currently titled "Is the Fine-Tuning Evidence for a Multiverse?", this paper is a defence of the very same Roger White paper I had been critiquing, and the main argument it tackles relates to some points I made. I thought I should give my take, but before I do I'll…
The Fine-Tuning Problem I've been thinking a lot lately about the problem of fine-tuning and how it may or may not be resolved by appeal to a multiverse. This has been prompted by recent correspondence with the philosopher Philip Goff and by the book I am currently reading, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I hope to get around to discussing Deutsch's ideas in future, but for now I'm…
In my last post I discussed some issues with identifying objectively which computations a physical system could legitimately be interpreted as instantiating. Computationalism is usually taken to be the view that all it takes to create a conscious mind is to implement the right computation, so the idea that we can't tell objectively when a computation is implemented implies either that there is no…
I wanted to come out of blog dormancy to write up my thoughts on what I feel is a very important argument against computationalism. The argument advances the view that there is no objective fact of the matter about which computations a physical system is computing, and if this is the case it would certainly seem to problematise computationalism (the view that what it is to be a conscious mind is…
As a pretty convinced atheist, I am not the target audience for Longing to Know, by Esther Lightcap Meek, which seeks to explain a view of knowledge in general, but in particular of how we might come to know God. When it was nominated for discussion by my philosophy reading group, I hoped that I would at least get some interesting discussion of epistemology out of it, and to an extent I did, but…
A frustrating interruption of Internet service has rendered me unable to work, so I might as well put my time to good use by catching up on blogging on the assumption that I will be able to upload this text at some later time. It also means, unfortunately, that I am unable to use references as I write. As such, I might get some things wrong. The issue I want to address is the so-called Ontological…
This is my entry to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge. Needless to say, it didn't win, but I'm reasonably happy with it nonetheless. The Moral Landscape (TML) is engagingly written and cleverly argued. Harris starts with the assumption that morality concerns maximising the well-being of conscious creatures (let’s call this Harris’s axiom). Much of what follows is laudable, but there are…
Max Tegmark A couple of years ago I was reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson and a number of ideas started to click into place for me. Without going into the novel too much (spoilers), it prompted me to think about the nature of reality and why it might be that the universe exists. Over the course of a few sleepless nights, it all came together and it seemed too make so much sense that I could…
I have briefly discussed mathematical Platonism in previous articles . This post is going to contain my current thoughts about it. Mathematical Platonism is distinct from classic Platonism (so nothing about ideal forms, for instance) and holds that three propositions are true. 1. Mathematical objects exist. 2. Mathematical objects are independent of human beings. 3. Mathematical objects are…
There are two major flavours of naturalism - methodological naturalism and metaphysical or philosophical naturalism. The former essentially means adopting the attitude that the latter is true as a pragmatic step without actually committing to the view that it is literally so. As such, only metaphysical naturalism is really in need of clarification. I have already explained on this blog that I am a…
I have a lot of time for both Sam Harris and Dan Dennett. I find I often disagree with Harris, but his arguments are usually interesting and well-considered. The disagreements I have with him are often subtle, as in the case of The Moral Landscape, where I think his moral framework is perfectly valid and useful but not the only objectively correct one. I seem to agree with Dan Dennett most of the…
A common argument against atheism is the claim that the deaths of millions in communist China and Russia during the Mao and Stalin eras show what happens when atheism is embraced by governments. The implication is that atheism and atheists are immoral, and that the only thing preventing society from disintegrating into an inhuman authoritarian hell is the morality emanating from the religious in…
I've been posting some comments on Massimo Pigliucci's blog recently in defense of Strong AI, after a couple of posts attacking the computational theory of mind. In the first , he uses John Searle's Chinese Room argument to demonstrate that a computer cannot be conscious. If you've been paying attention to this blog, you should know what I think of that argument ! In the second post, he uses an…
My last post presented what I feel is the strongest form of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) promoted by Alvin Plantinga. Today I will attempt to refute it. Rather than argue as some have that we can rely on our reason because of tools developed over centuries by a process of cultural evolution, I want to show that even the primitive faculties provided to us by evolution have…
As part of a disagreement with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci on Rationally Speakin g, I have found myself in the unusual position of having to defend Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. As a firm proponent of philosophical naturalism, I do not find the EAAN to be persuasive. However, I feel that Pigliucci has treated the argument unfairly, glossing over the crucial point…
I've taken a long hiatus while I tried to think if there was anything substantive I had left to say about Strong AI. I didn't come up with much, so I'll wrap it up with this post. I think I have shown that there is no good argument against Strong AI, the view that any sufficiently intelligent and self-reflecting computer system would be conscious in the same sense that we are, or, put in other…
In my previous post, I alluded to an argument made by John Lucas and popularised by Roger Penrose against the possibility of AI, and this is that Gödel 's Incompleteness Theorems suggest that even weak AI is impossible. We could never make a computer system that behaved intelligently. Loosely put, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems put fundamental limits on what can be achieved by working with formal…
In this article, I want to examine the issues presented by the problem of consciousness when examined from a naturalistic or physicalist point of view. What I present in this article is probably not a knock-down argument proving the computational theory of consciousness (Strong AI) within this framework. Rather it shows that the alternatives are rather problematic. When we assume a naturalist…