Here’s a recent thread on philosophy of AI from Twitter/X, in which I address rather popular arguments made by Emily Bender and others to the effect that LLM outputs are strictly speaking meaningless. I think these argument are flawed, as I explain below. But I think it’s worth categorising these as post-Searlean critiques, following John Searle’s infamous arguments against the possibility of computational intentionality. I think post-Searlean and post-Dreyfusian critiques form the main strands of contemporary opposition to the possibility of AI technologies developing human-like capacities.
Continue reading TfE: On Post-Searlean Critiques of LLMsTag: AI
TfE: The Problem with Bayes / Solmonoff
Here’s a recent thread musing about problems with Bayesian conceptions of general intelligence and the more specific variants based on Solmonoff induction, such as AIXI. I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot recently, in tandem with the proper interpretation of the no free lunch theorems in the context of machine learning. I’m writing something that will hopefully incorporate some of these ideas, but I do not know how much detail I will be able to go into there.
Continue reading TfE: The Problem with Bayes / SolmonoffFor the Love of Spinoza
Happy New Year everyone. Levi recently put up an interesting post about Spinoza’s account of the relation between causal knowledge and ethics (here). As some of you may know, I’m quite a big fan of Spinoza. Not just of his metaphysics, but also of his resistance to Aristotelian teleology and his resolve to think freedom in a way compatible with his completely deterministic metaphysics. As I’ve argued elsewhere (here), Spinoza reconciles freedom with the principle of sufficient reason in a much healthier manner than Leibniz, and a lot of contemporary debates on this issue can be interpreted as taking place between neo-Leibnizians and neo-Spinozists. I’m firmly in the neo-Spinozist camp, but this doesn’t mean that I agree with Spinoza completely. Levi’s post very clearly outlines one of the points where I have an important disagreement with him (and his heirs), so it’s useful to address it. It also gives me a good excuse to work through some of the ideas I’ve been having about ethics and politics over the past few months.
This post is another fairly long one (8,000 words or so), but it not only contains my thoughts on Spinoza, but also some thoughts on Kant, Foucault, Sellars, Hegel, and Plato, which it pulls together to provide the outline of a theory of Justice. That may sound a bit over the top, but I’m nothing if not ambitious. Anyway, on with the show…
DEONTOLOGISTICS 