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4058562.108075
The idea that the universe is governed by laws of nature has precursors from ancient times, but the view that it is a or even the primary - or even the primary - aim of science to discover these laws only became established during the 16th and 17th century when it replaced the then prevalent Aristotelian conception of science. The most prominent promoters and developers of the new view were Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Descartes, in Le Monde dreamed of an elegant mathematical theory that specified laws that describe the motions of matter and Newton in his Principia went a long way towards realizing this dream.
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4058585.108236
This paper considers the mundane ways in which AI is being incorporated into scientific practice today, and particularly the extent to which AI is used to automate tasks perceived to be boring, “mere routine” and inconvenient to researchers. We label such uses as instances of “Convenience AI” — that is situations where AI is applied with the primary intention to increase speed and minimize human effort. We outline how attributions of convenience to AI applications involve three key characteristics: (i) an emphasis on speed and ease of action, (ii) a comparative element, as well as (iii) a subject-dependent and subjective quality. Using examples from medical science and development economics, we highlight epistemic benefits, complications, and drawbacks of Convenience AI along these three dimensions. While the pursuit of convenience through AI can save precious time and resources as well as give rise to novel forms of inquiry, our analysis underscores how the uncritical adoption of Convenience AI for the sake of shortcutting human labour may also weaken the evidential foundations of science and generate inertia in how research is planned, set-up and conducted, with potentially damaging implications for the knowledge being produced. Critically, we argue that the consistent association of Convenience AI with the goals of productivity, efficiency, and ease, as often promoted also by companies targeting the research market for AI applications, can lower critical scrutiny of research processes and shift focus away from appreciating their broader epistemic and social implications.
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4059384.108253
People are often surprisingly hostile to the very idea of moral optimizing, presumably because it’s more gratifying to simply act on vibes and emotional appeal (or they don’t want to be on the hook for moral verdicts that go against their personal interests). …
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4175455.108262
A. I guess because I'm exploring the format in some of my own writing. Q. A. It's not ready to show to anyone. In fact the project is more notional than actual—a few notes in a plain text file, which I peek at from time to time. …
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4223579.108269
Two problems are investigated. Why is it that in his solutions to logical problems, Boole’s logical/numerical operations can be difficult to pin down, and why did his late manuscript attempt to get rid of division by zero fall short of that goal? It is suggested that the former is due to different readings that he gives to the operations according to the stage of the solution routine, and the latter is due to a strict confinement to equational reasoning.
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4223599.10828
Ancient formulations of the distinction between continuous and separative hypotheticals, made by Peripatetics working under Stoic influence, can be vague and confusing. Perhaps the clearest expositor of the matter was Galen. We review his account, provide two formal articulations of it, verify their equivalence, and show that for what we call ‘simple’ hypotheticals, the formal line of demarcation is independent of whether or not modality is taken into account.
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4231549.10829
Following the lead of heterogeneous and invariably brilliant thinkers as Thucydides, Arnold J. Toynbee, Winston Churchill, Carl Sagan, Philip K. Dick, and Niall Ferguson, I consider a virtual history – or an alternative Everettian branch of the universal wavefunction – in which the ancient materialism and atomism of Epicurus (and heliocentrism of Aristarchus, for good measure) have prevailed over the (Neo) Platonist-Aristotelian religious-military complex. Such a historical swerve (pun fully intended) would have removed the unhealthy obsession with mind-body dualism and dialectics, which crippled much of the European thought throughout the last millennium. It is at least open to serious questioning whether quasireligious totalitarian ideologies could have arisen and brought about so much death, suffering and pain in this virtual history as they did in our actual history.
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4231568.108302
There’s a certain mindset that some people have when they think about fundamental physics and the world of middle-sized dry goods. The mindset is that the middle-sized stuff is somehow “less real” than the stuff that physics describes — elementary particles, quantum fields, etc. There are quite a few philosophers, and some scientists, who hold this view with great conviction, and whose research is driven by a desire to validate it. There are other people who have a completely different attitude about reductionism: they see it as the enemy of the good and beautiful, and as a force to be stopped. The worries of the anti-reductionists do seem to be well-motivated. If, for example, your wife is nothing more than some quantum fields in a certain state, then why vouchsafe her your eternal and undying love? More generally, is the existence of trees, horses, or our own children nothing more than a convenient fiction that biology or religion has tricked us into believing? If physics shows that these things are not fully real, how should we then live?
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4231589.108309
It has been argued that non-epistemic values have legitimate roles to play in the classification of psychiatric disorders. Such a value-laden view on psychiatric classification raises questions about the extent to which expert disagreements over psychiatric classification are fueled by disagreements over value judgments and the extent to which these disagreements could be resolved. This paper addresses these questions by arguing for two theses. First, a major source of disagreements about psychiatric classification is factual and concerns what social consequences a classification decision will have. This type of disagreement can be addressed by empirical research, although obtaining and evaluating relevant empirical evidence often requires interdisciplinary collaboration.
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4231608.108316
The Hard Problem of consciousness—explaining why and how physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience—remains one of the most challenging puzzles in modern thought. Rather than attempting to resolve this issue outright, in this paper I explore whether empirical science can be broadened to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental degree of freedom. Drawing on Russellian monism and revisiting the historical “relegation problem” (the systematic sidelining of consciousness by the scientific revolution), I propose an extension of quantum mechanics by augmenting the Hilbert space with a “consciousness dimension.” This framework provides a basis for reinterpreting psi phenomena (e.g., telepathy, precognition) as natural outcomes of quantum nonlocality and suggests that advanced non– human intelligence (NHI) technology might interface with a quantum–conscious substrate.
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4260846.108323
The Aristotelian corpus (corpus aristotelicum) is the
collection of the extant works transmitted under the name of Aristotle
along with its organizational features, such as its ordering, internal
textual divisions (into books and chapters) and titles. It has evolved
over time: Aristotelian treatises have sometimes been lost and
sometimes recovered, “spurious” works now regarded as
inauthentic have joined the collection while scribes and scholars were
attempting to organize its massive amount of text in various ways. The
texts it includes are highly technical treatises that were not
originally intended for publication and first circulated within
Aristotle’s philosophical circle only, Aristotle distinguishes
them from his “exoteric” works (Pol.
1278b30; EE 1217b22,
1218b34) which were meant for a wider audience.
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4260860.108329
The uses of the word “ideology” are so divergent as to
make it doubtful that there is any conceptual unity to the term. It
may refer to a comprehensive worldview, a legitimating discourse, a
partisan political doctrine, culture, false beliefs that help support
illegitimate power, beliefs that reinforce group identity, or
mystification. It is often used pejoratively, but just as often it is
a purely descriptive term. When authors criticize ideology, they may
be criticizing complicity with injustice, confirmation bias,
illusions, self-serving justifications, or dogmatism. When authors
identify ideology, they may locate it in forms of consciousness,
propositional attitudes, culture, institutions, discourses, social
conventions, or material rituals.
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4312631.108336
As always, please ‘like’ this post via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. Of course, the very best way to support my work is with a paid subscription. …
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4319482.108343
Many philosophers and linguists agree that there are two kinds of conversational implicatures: there are not only the well-known paradigm examples of conversational implicatures that are not entailed by the sentences that are used to bring them about; there are also less-often discussed conversational implicatures that are entailed by the sentences in question. In this paper, I take a closer look by examining classical candidates as well as novel contenders for entailed conversational implicatures. I argue that one might rightly classify some of these cases as conversational implicatures but show that doing so has so far unnoticed consequences.
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4347031.10835
I’m giving a talk next Friday, March 14th, at 9 am Pacific Daylight time here in California. You’re all invited! (Note that Daylight Savings Time starts March 9th, so do your calculations carefully if you do them before then.) …
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4392164.108357
In the previous post, I offered a criticism of defining logical consequence by means of proofs. A more precise way to put my criticism would be:
Logical consequence is equally well defined by (i) tree-proofs or by (ii) Fitch-proofs. …
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4393846.108364
In A New Logic, a New Information Measure, and a New Information-Based Approach to Interpreting Quantum Mechanics [13], David Ellerman argues that the essence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics is the linearized Hilbert space version of the mathematics of partitions. In his article, Ellerman lays out the key mathematical concepts involved in the progression from logic, to logical information, to quantum theory—of distinctions versus indistinctions, definiteness versus indefiniteness, or distinguishability versus indistinguishability, which he argues run throughout the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
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4397796.108372
We furnish a core-logical development of the Gödel numbering framework that allows metamathematicians to attain limitative results about arithmetical truth without incorporating a genuine truth predicate into the language in a way that would lead to semantic closure. We show how Tarski’s celebrated theorem on the arithmetical undefinability of arithmetical truth can be established using only core logic in both the object language and the metalanguage. We do so at a high level of abstraction, by augmenting the usual first-order language of arithmetic with a primitive predicate Tr and then showing how it cannot be a truth predicate for the augmented language. McGee established an important result about consistent theories that are in the language of arithmetic augmented by such a “truth predicate” Tr and that use Gödel numbering to refer to expressions of the augmented language. Given the nature of his sought result, he was forced to use classical reasoning at the meta level. He did so, however, on the additional and tacit presupposition that the arithmetical theories in question (in the object language) would be closed under classical logic. That left open the dialectical possibility that a constructivist (or intuitionist) could claim not to be discomfited by the results, even if they were to “give a pass” on the unavoidably classical reasoning at the meta level. In this study we “constructivize” McGee’s result, by presuming only core logic for the object language. This shows that the perplexity induced by McGee’s result will confront the constructivist (or intuitionist) as well.
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4397817.10838
Berry’s Paradox, like Russell’s Paradox, is a ‘paradox’ in name only. It differs from genuine logico-semantic paradoxes such as the Liar Paradox, Grelling’s Paradox, the Postcard Paradox, Yablo’s Paradox, the Knower Paradox, Prior’s Intensional Paradoxes, and their ilk. These latter arise from semantic closure. Their genuine paradoxicality manifests itself as the non-normalizability of the formal proofs or disproofs associated with them. The Russell, the Berry, and the Burali-Forti ‘paradoxes’, by contrast, simply reveal the straightforward inconsistency of their respective existential claims—that the Russell set exists; that the Berry number exists; and that the ordinal of the well-ordering of all ordinals exists. The disproofs of these existential claims are in free logic and are in normal form. They show that certain complex singular terms do not—indeed, cannot—denote. All this counsels reconsideration of Ramsey’s famous division of paradoxes and contradictions into his Group A and Group B. The proof-theoretic criterion of genuine paradoxicality formally explicates an informal and occasionally confused notion. The criterion should be allowed to reform our intuitions about what makes for genuine paradoxicality, as opposed to straightforward (albeit surprising) inconsistency.
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4401826.108387
There are two main accounts of ψ being a logical consequence of ϕ:
Inferentialist: there is a proof from ϕ to ψ
Model theoretic: every model of ϕ is a model of ψ. Both suffer from a related problem. On inferentialism, the problem is that there are many different concepts of proof all of which yield an equivalent relation of between ϕ and ψ. …
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4404583.108394
Does science have any aim(s)? If not, does it follow that the debate about scientific progress is somehow misguided or problematically non-objective? These are two of the central questions posed in Rowbottom’s Scientific Progress. In this paper, I argue that we should answer both questions in the negative. Science probably has no aims, certainly not a single aim; but it does not follow from this that the debate about scientific progress is somehow misguided or problematically non-objective.
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4404606.108406
This paper examines the tension between the growing algorithmic control in safety-critical societal contexts—motivated by human cognitive fallibility—and the rise of probabilistic types of AI, primarily in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although both human cognition and LLMs exhibit inherent uncertainty and occasional unreliability, some futurist visions of the “Singularity” paradoxically advocate relinquishing control of the main societal processes–including critical ones–to these probabilistic AI agents, heightening the risks of a resulting unpredictable or “whimsical” governance. As an alternative, a “mediated control” framework is proposed here: a more prudent alternative wherein LLM-AGIs are strategically employed as “meta-programmers” to design sophisticated–but fundamentally deterministic–algorithms and procedures, or, in general, powerful rule-based solutions. It is these algorithms or procedures, executed on classical computing infrastructure and under human oversight, the systems to be deployed–based on human deliberative decision processes–as the actual controllers of critical systems and processes. This constitutes a way to harness AGI creativity for algorithmic innovation while maintaining essential reliability, predictability, and human accountability of the processes controlled by the algorithms so produced. The framework emphasizes a division of labor between the LLM-AGI and the algorithms it devises, a rigorous verification and validation protocols as conditions for safe algorithm generation, and a mediated application of the algorithms. Such an approach is not a guaranteed solution to the challenges of advanced AI, but–it is argued–it offers a more human-aligned, risk-mitigated, and ultimately more beneficial path towards integrating AGI into societal governance, possibly leading to a safer future, while preserving essential domains of human freedom and agency.
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4404653.108415
In current philosophy of science, extrapolation is seen as an inference from a study to a distinct target system of interest. The reliability of such an inference is generally thought to depend on the extent to which study and target are similar in relevant respects, which is especially problematic when they are heterogeneous. This paper argues that this understanding is underdeveloped when applied to extrapolation in ecology. Extrapolation in ecology is not always well characterized as an inference from a model to a distinct target but often includes inferences from small-scale experimental systems to large-scale processes in nature, i.e., inferences across spatiotemporal scales. For this reason, I introduce a distinction between compositional and spatiotemporal variability. Whereas the former describes differences in entities and causal factors between model and target, the latter refers to the variability of a system over space and time. The central claim of this paper is that our understanding of heterogeneity needs to be expanded to explicitly include spatiotemporal variability and its effects on extrapolation across spatiotemporal scales.
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4414891.108424
I’ve been watching the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” lately. The series is an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same title. For the readers who have never heard about it, this dystopia takes place in the context of worldwide infertility where the United States of America has disappeared following a civil war. …
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4453907.108431
There is a certain kind of symmetry between praise and blame. We praise someone who incurs a cost to themselves by going above and beyond obligation and thereby benefitting another. We blame someone who benefits themselves by failing to fulfill an obligation and thereby harming another. …
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4484594.108442
It seems very plausible that for any specific Turing machine M there is a fact of the matter about whether M would halt. We can just imagine running the experiment in an idealized world with an infinite future, and surely either it will halt or it won’t halt. …
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4495205.108449
In a reference letter for Feyerabend’s application to UC Berkeley, Carl Hempel writes that ‘Mr. Feyerabend combines a forceful and penetrating analytic mind with a remarkably thorough training and high competence in theoretical physics and mathematics’ (Collodel and Oberheim, unpublished, 80). Similarly, Rudolf Carnap says of Feyerabend that he ‘knows both the physics and the philosophy thoroughly, and he is particularly well versed in the fundamental logical and epistemological problems of physics’ (83). These remarks echo a sentiment widely accepted amongst Feyerabend’s colleagues that his knowledge of physics was at an extremely high level. Feyerabend’s acumen in physics goes back to his youth, when, at the age of 13, he was offered a position as an observer at the Swiss Institute for Solar Research after building his own telescope (Feyerabend 1995, 27). It is unsurprising, therefore, that physics played an important and long-lasting role in Feyerabend’s work.
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4496540.108457
The desirable gambles framework provides a foundational approach to imprecise probability theory but relies heavily on linear utility assumptions. This paper introduces function-coherent gambles, a generalization that accommodates non-linear utility while preserving essential rationality properties. We establish core axioms for function-coherence and prove a representation theorem that characterizes acceptable gambles through continuous linear functionals. The framework is then applied to analyze various forms of discounting in intertemporal choice, including hyperbolic, quasi-hyperbolic, scale-dependent, and state-dependent discounting. We demonstrate how these alternatives to constant-rate exponential discounting can be integrated within the function-coherent framework. This unified treatment provides theoretical foundations for modeling sophisticated patterns of time preference within the desirability paradigm, bridging a gap between normative theory and observed behavior in intertemporal decision-making under genuine uncertainty.
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4503013.108464
According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.
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4519647.108479
For Karl Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some beliefs in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false; their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests. One can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (that is, the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. I illustrate this analysis with some of Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes and offer an account of Marx’s conception of “interests.”