“ It is important to realize how profoundly anti-scientific Strong AI is. The scientific approach is to treat the brain as a machine like any other; a biological machine to be sure, but all the same a machine. The machine processes in the brain are as much machine processes as the machine processes in the stomach and the digestive tract. There is a residual dualism in Strong AI because it does not treat cognition as a normal part of the natural biological world like any other biological phenomena. It treats it as computation and computation does not name a machine process defined in terms of energy transfer. It names an abstract, mathematical, algorithmic set of processes that we have found ways to implement on machines, but the process itself is not defined as a machine process.
“ The last person you ask how to do X is someone who’s good at doing X.
“ Irrefutable does not mean true.
“ I feel like people outside of philosophy would find it hard to understand the nature of disagreement in philosophy. Disagreement in philosophy is this very strange phenomenon. Say you’re involved in a political debate: you have this sense that each side is trying to crush and defeat the other one. Philosophers have a very different way of disagreeing. If you read a philosophy paper that disagrees with another philosophy paper, the philosopher will start out by trying to give the most charitable interpretation of what the other might say, and then offer objections. But then they even do their best to think of how the person might respond to those objections, and so forth. It’s such a charitable, reasonable way of thinking something is a mistake.
I will be presenting my paper “Excuses, Equivocation, & The New Evil Demon Problem” at the Mid-Hudson Valley Philosophy Conference on March 30-31, and at the Pacific University Philosophy Conference on April 20-21.
“ Each adventurous genius will still leap at the arduous prize, and find himself stimulated (rather than discouraged) by the failures of his predecessors, while he hopes that the glory of achieving so hard an adventure is reserved for him alone.
when they often publish unscholarly, uninformed garbage like this.
response by Eddy Nahmias.
“ You can’t start out with a non-mechanical theory, subtract out the non-mechanical parts and end up with a mechanical theory. That’s what Darwin thought he was doing, I think. And that doesn’t work. There are fallacies of subtraction. There are some cases where you’ve got A and B, you take out B, and you don’t have A any more.
“ In the history of philosophy, post-modernism is just an embarrassing blip, largely anti-naturalist in its sympathies, but infatuated with sophomoric versions of skepticism about truth and knowledge, that both the naturalist and anti-naturalist, and realist and moralist traditions largely repudiate.
“ It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.
