/r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | November 28, 2022

Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_z6xcal in philosophy

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

  • Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

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Ingvariuss t1_iy41fzu wrote

I've been reading philosophy since I was a child, and I've always imagined how awe-inspiring it would be to converse with philosophers from the past.

Well, advances in deep learning and natural language processing have made this possible in some ways, and I've set a goal for myself to create a small project as proof of concept.

This project is titled "Speaking with Plato - A Deep Learning Approach to Philosophy." Plato is a favorite philosopher of mine, and his philosophy is still very relevant today.

Plato's Theory of Forms can be seen in the field of pattern recognition. Here we see issues when it comes to training AI algorithms that are easy for humans.

When it comes to image pattern recognition, for example, we can easily train a child to recognize a tree. We can also train an AI to perform this task, but it will fail when presented with a fake tree.

The above problem that AI revealed to us was masked by our meaning-making capabilities. Mainly, our embodied brain, which is dynamically coupled with the environment, can render things obvious to us. Therefore, we think that the explanation comes from that obvious.

Two deep-learning models are used in the project. One is a Chatbot that simulates a conversation with Socrates, while the other is more creative and generates text in an attempt to imitate Plato. All of his work is also explored as part of an EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis).

Here's a sneak peek:

User: What is virtue?

Socrates: A thing which is taught by a certain master, and which is rightly taught by him; and he who taught it, and has taught it also, is good in so far as it is taught?

More can be read in this blog: https://dataspiral.blog/speaking-with-plato/

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tecumbera t1_iy6rgyh wrote

I’m going to go completely off-topic but the idea of conversing with mighty philosophers has always frightened me immensely. I’m not a genius or a published philosopher, I don’t even have a degree in philosophy but even then I have read a fair amount of text and have been seeking to further increase my understanding and interpretation of said texts. That being said, conversing or debating with those kind of philosophers would have left me either awestruck for weeks, completely convinced of whatever they told me or in a worst case scenario, completely hopeless and full of doubts. I would love to converse with those philosophers, some living and others dead but I don’t really know if that would be healthy for me.

Anyways, sorry for hijacking your comment.

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Ingvariuss t1_iy7zo5k wrote

No worries, thanks for contributing to the comment!

I do share a similar feeling and background to you. For example, I can't imagine needing to speak or debate Hegel. Wittgenstein probably wouldn't even want to talk anymore :D

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c0rd1s t1_iy3tksr wrote

Hi, hope this thread qualifies for the open discussion - if not, maybe I was not lucky enough and it should be moved somewhere else.

Anyway, I’d like to discuss Gettier problems. It seems I don’t appreciate the depth of the problem enough, as the solution appears to be on the surface to me, so I’m hoping you could point at my logical error here.

Context: Gettier case intends to challenge JTB (justified-true-belief) concept of knowledge. Classical example is of Smith believing that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket and being “mistakenly right” with reasoning as follows:

  1. Company president tells him that Jones will win the job
  2. Smith believes that Jones will win the job
  3. Smith observes that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket
  4. Smith infers that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket

In the end, Smith got the job instead, but as he by chance had 10 coins in his pocket too, he was right.

The problem as I see it is in answering the question whether by fulfilling the JTB, we could say Smith indeed knew that the winner had 10 coins.

In my opinion (and I humbly accept it’s only one incomplete and likely wrong perspective), the problem doesn’t really pose a challenge to the original definition, and could be invalidated if we take a closer look at step 4 of the above reasoning.

Following Wittgenstein, what the author really saying is “Smith thinks that [Jones] who has 10 coins in his pocket will win the job”. Whether or not Smith was right a posteriori is irrelevant - step 2 of the reasoning (that Jones will win the job) does not satisfy the truth requirement, and as step 4 can be reduced to step 2, it is therefore not knowledge regardless. In other words, the equal phrase of the challenge could be “Smith thinks that Jones will win the job”, and it should take precedence over a more complex one.

In other examples (e.g. looking at a dog disguised as a sheep and concluding that there’s a sheep in the field when indeed there’s one outside of sight of the viewer) the problem is the same - by introducing a false belief and further expanding it with additional unjustified statement that leads to a true statement. However, if we look closely, the actual statement is “The viewer thinks there’s a [dog that he thinks is] a sheep in the field”, which is not the same as “The viewer thinks there’s a sheep in the field”. Again, since it’s possible to break down the “chain of knowledge” to simpler steps and discover an error there (that what he saw was a dog and not a sheep), the chain as a whole fails to become knowledge but doesn’t really void the original definition of JTB. The reduced statement for which JTB is still valid would be “The viewer believes that what he sees is a sheep” (which is not true).

Now, I know that this problem will celebrate its 60th anniversary soon, but I fail to see what I miss in my attempts to solve it. I’d appreciate your comments and help in improving my logical thinking. Thank you.

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Capital_Net_6438 t1_iycdta1 wrote

Seems like your response to the 10 coins example is to reject the hypo. Surely it is possible for Smith to have the belief that whoever will get job has 10 coins in his pocket. As it is also possible for him to believe Jones will be the job winner with 10 coins. The former belief - about whoever - is justified, true, but not known. And thus a counter example to JTB.

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c0rd1s t1_iycf7j9 wrote

I guess it’s difficult for me to see how this belief is justified if it doesn’t follow from his previous belief that Jones would win the job. In other words, if we accept that these two beliefs are linked, the chain breaks on the first belief that is not true, and it’s irrelevant whether later links yield a true result.

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TheHeigendov t1_iy48yjx wrote

Do you believe man is capable of generating meaning from nothing, or that man is capable of finding meaning where it previously did not exist? or neither?

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ViniciusSilva_Lesser t1_iy5jtm6 wrote

man does create meaning from nothing, that's basically one of mind's basic skills. A kid can get a corn cob and play with it like it was a doll, or put wheels on it and make it a car.

But if the point you ask is as to whether this meaning was invented or it existed in reality, well, that's both. Every science is a human invention, and yet it has real objects as its basis. So what it tells points to the real object, thus it's true, once decodified in facts. That is the same as for meaning itself. We may phrase it like that: we can't see the meaning of things as the Omniscient could, in a perfect way, in perfect categories, but we we can see meaning through our imagination. We create it, yet it exists as a possibility of the things.

I'm not sure if this is clear, but I hope it's understandable.

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TheHeigendov t1_iy5r326 wrote

>we can’t see the meaning of things as the Omniscient could, in a perfect way, in perfect categories, but we we can see meaning through our imagination. We create it, yet it exists as a possibility of the things.

so do you believe the essence of a thing preceeds its existence? Is the conceptual, in your mind, more pressing in regard to the nature of a thing than the physical?

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ViniciusSilva_Lesser t1_iy5udpn wrote

I still haven't read existentialism, except for Louis Lavelle, which is not very famous, but has a great philosophy. So, I think I'd say yes to the question.

E.g.1: there has to have formal, fixed rules of Nature, or else no science would ever evolve from one generation to another. We found Newton didn't have the complete equations, although they still work within a certain scope. But the fact we could change it to Einstein and Planck's model means the real laws themselves are fixed. (although they're most likely not Newton's, nor Einstein or Planck's, and maybe we never even get the complete version of it, but the fact our laws predict true events means they both shows the true laws exist and points to them).

E.g.2: The same way, each male has a lot of common features. If it wasn't so, you couldn't use the knowledge of one man to another, so each man you meet would be the first and only one, and that would be like every person speaking a language on their own, completely unrelated one another, thus incommunicable. That's literally impossible. Even more: what we know about a man we can apply, to a certain degree, to a woman. Because in a more general way, both are human beings. You can expand this and basically say that the same possibility of analogy and metaphor human mind can do proves the fact that everything is connected in this "more abstract category" which we call the Being. (Being is basically a word to call the most abstract aspect of an object, which everything necessarily has in itself. So there's me, I'm a man, that is a human being, that is an animal, that is living thing, that is an existence, that is a being: each category gets more abstract; we may think about it in another terms or more terms, but Being is the most abstract nonetheless).

So there's essence, which is this structural aspect, and each thing grabs a lot from each of these categories, from the being to itself. The point of the self, though, is the existence. We may say it doesn't change the essence, because a human man can't do what is inherently impossible to it. But we can do things that are unlikely. For instance, a man can decide he is a woman, and then change many of its atributes. He may look a lot like a woman, but it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that in reality he is a man who opened such possibilities, which weren't very common before 20th century. Because of that we may try to say "existence changes essence", but it isn't true. We may even accept as a woman, in existence/phenomenical world, but it can only be so because man and woman are both from a very close structure. If a man, though, for a different reason would try to truly identify with something else, whatever it is, that would be much harder, though.

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TheHeigendov t1_iy6v674 wrote

I think you would get a lot out of reading Sarte, if I were you I would dive into Being and Nothingess (better translated as Being And Non-Being, in my opinion, but c'est la vie) and not look back.

Thank you for such an in-depth explanation, I appreciate it

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telephantomoss t1_iy7xzyq wrote

Depends on what you mean by "nothing". Are you a materialist? Dualist? Other?

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TheHeigendov t1_iy8mg90 wrote

i'd say i'm a nondualist

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telephantomoss t1_iy9h1qd wrote

Is that nondualism more similar to a mind-only kind or more like a matter-only variety? In the former, I feel like meaning is ontologically fundamental in some sense while in the latter meaning doesn't exist, and is just a figment of illusory experience---meaning is just overlaid onto an otherwise meaningless fundamental reality.

That being said, even in a materialism-only view, one can say that meaning is still there in an information-theoretic sense. Reality has real objects and structure, and an organism is sensing that and representing it with patterns of neural activity. When said organism communicates with another organism, there is an ontologically real correspondence between their neural activity and the patterns in the communication with the actual real world they are sensing and communicating about. That is the meaning of their communication, it "means" the particular arrangement of material reality.

I am more of a mind-only type of nondualist though (at present).

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TheHeigendov t1_iy9hvvc wrote

Far moreso the former, in that I believe the reality that we perceive on a day to day basis is to an extent generated by the collective unconsciousness of man, though I would also say that I lean towards Sarte's idea that human existence preceeds its essence.

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telephantomoss t1_iy9nout wrote

I'm not well-read, so know nothing about Sarte. I'll have to look it up to understand that idea!

I think perceptions/experiences are literally all there "is," just a massive complex web of interacting perceptions. What we experience is simply how the experience of others appears from the outside. It's kind of like Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism, except I think that I think the instantiation of the individual mind precedes the bodily form (i.e. kind of like Eastern ideas on a soul reincarnating).

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NotVote t1_iy75elv wrote

Where should I go to learn more about panpsychism? Any books I should read or lectures I should watch?

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telephantomoss t1_iy7xgym wrote

Handbook of Panpsychism or start with wikipedia and Stanford online Plato encyclopedia. I've been reading a lot about that and idealism lately. I am leaning towards the latter view now.

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MikalKing t1_iy9gs51 wrote

"If anyone can refute me‚ show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective‚ I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after." Marcus Aurelius

I just discovered this quote for the first time this morning. It makes a lot of sense to me. I've lived all my life having a strong opinion, but at the same time, I take responsibility for my wrongs.

The question of the post,

Does the fact that Marcus Aurelius was a slave owner have an effect on the meanings of his teachers that do not reference the issues of slaver ? Such as this one.

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xl_mara_ t1_iyeb7v0 wrote

I look at these situations as “or statements” Bool DidMarcusHaveGoodTeachings(); { if ((marcus is right about finding) || (marcus was right about slavery)) { Return true; } Else { return false;} }

See how both things don’t have to be true, just one.

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[deleted] t1_iy6jwho wrote

[deleted]

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telephantomoss t1_iy7xqoo wrote

Maybe truth is chaotic and even seemingly inconsequential truths can have effects far away.

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kindthought5 t1_iy9w775 wrote

Arguing moral values is arguing beliefs - you can't argue beliefs, you can only accept or not accept them. Moral values are only truth to those who believe in them. You can argue facts but not beliefs.

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Carterknowsitall t1_iy9v5g8 wrote

Can anyone help me with a class project. I have to use social contract theory and link it to the death penalty and explain why it is right or wrong.

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veggietalebroccoli t1_iybzlug wrote

The theory that all consequences upon the path of existence were decided at a root point cannot be disproven upon its assumption. Murphy's law’s definiteness is rooted in the fact that we do not know the future. Though we feel we can change the future, we truly cannot. by choosing to do any action however consequential, you do not change the path of reality that was destined at its root. You simply knock it off course, keeping its validity as the one true reality.

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SuperSirVexSmasher t1_iye0ibi wrote

So why is everything on here just a link to a blog post or an article? If you aren't sharing a blog link you have to post it under this thread? That's pretty dumb. This needs to be amended

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LateInTheAfternoon t1_iyebza2 wrote

According to the rules you can post something without link to some exterior resource as long as you abide by rule 2.

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TRIPMINE_Guy t1_iyfdnuq wrote

It's possible for the human genome to have evolved on another planet. If humanity went extinct, we could send our genome into space in hopes of aliens finding it and cloning us so that we may live on as a species. In both cases the end result of the human genome propagating in the universe but with no significant ties to our earth are the same. Our genome being cloned by aliens seems better to me even though the end result is the same.

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