Guyau

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Guyau last won the day on March 30 2023

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    Stephen Boydstun
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  1. "I was reading a book the other day." (Dinner at Eight) We do not own a cell phone. I am designing and building my own sidewalk at age 74. Walter got a bathtub drain cleared today. I got a book in the mail today. This form of life is our right fit and balance.
  2. Michael, For a couple I decades, I've argued that no intelligence at the level of humans is possible without consciousness and no consciousness is possible except in a living agent. That last word is a giveaway that the life-form would be animal-like. A plant is not an agent. My professor in this area was the author of Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985); Mind Design II (1997); and Having Thought (2000). He is the one who introduced me to writings and work of Brooks and many others in this vicinity of work. No engineering entails violating causality or making something out of nothing. Engineered systems are made by selection of constraints in combinations of independent causal streams brought together by the engineer.* In making life, nature has "engineered" life in just that way. I mean living systems have that character of any engineered system. The differences between the way a natural plant cell is structured and a natural animal cell is structured are from two different solutions to a single engineering problem (Boydstun 1994, 121–23). What is essential for something to be life? Not that it is artificial or natural. The fullerene molecule was designed and accomplished by the chemists; later on it was also found to occur in nature. The nature the fullerene molecule has is the same regardless of whether it comes from the lab or from nature. That is how it goes also for any human success in constructing a living thing from inanimate elements, except that natural life came first and came first in our knowledge.* Is it essential to intelligent life that it be constructed from living substructures down to the level of cells? I don't know. That is the way nature has done it and "attained" intelligence. Is it essential to being a living agent, that it be able to replicate new instances of its kind? Its abilities to self-maintain and self-repair will eventually fail. I'm not sure that reproduction is an essential to the nature of being a living agent, however. There can be a last man, and still it had been a man. On the personal side, I'd like to mention that I do not harbor a hope that artificial rational agents will be brought about. The humans and all the living organisms (and their patterns in their collectives) natural of earth are sufficient, entirely enough, for my world of value.
  3. Michael, Man is in the process of creating life, artificial life. Creating a clock is creating clock existence, not creating existence in general. Creating life is creating life existence, not creating existence in general. Man creating life, artificial life, does not mean that nature did not also machinate life by its own methods, which may partially overlap our own deliberate methods. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Readers here may have an interest in this update from old-timer Rodney Brooks.
  4. Guyau

    Shostakovich

    Some favorites of mine.
  5. Additional works of Merlin are these.
  6. Korben, humans can make artificial life, they may come up to making artificial living robots, they may get even further and bring those artificial living sensing agents on up to being autonomous rational agents. It would not matter then that the artifacts were not natural, but created by us. The nature of that artifact would include that it is an end in itself, it would have the same rights vis-a-vis humans as humans have vis-a-vis humans. I am not an Objectivist, but I know it well, and I don't see any problem to assimilating this potential future development into Rand's philosophy.
  7. The situation with Nozick concerning distributive justice was: Free production and exchange ends up with a distribution. He defends the justice of that. He was arguing against colleagues who had been concerned with the issue and who criticized as unjust how distribution works out under a system of free production and exchange. Free from government redistribution and so forth. The three most important books for the coming into existence of the modern libertarian movement in America were Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State (Economics), and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (Political Philosophy). That modern classic by Nozick will be still studied a hundred years from now, I bet. It is somewhat difficult. He is a good, witty writer, and a brilliant thinker.* After completing that book, he turned away from political philosophy and wrote books in other areas of philosophy. He said he didn't want to spend his life writing "Son of ASU." The principal philosopher he was writing against concerning distributive justice (this topic is in the second of the three parts of ASU) was John Rawls. I gather that Rawls' views on this topic continued to be predominant to the present in academia, whereas, Nozick's came to predominate among intellectuals outside academia. Nozick died in 2002. I'd like to mention that, in my own view, not every thing about justice in property is about natural human moral rights. Some elements of convention enter into a system of just rights in property. In particular, for the present case, inheritance law is hugely conventional, though pedestrian defenders of the status quo like to pass it off as all a matter of natural rights. The status quo might well be the best choice of arrangement, all things considered. There are costs to changing social conventions, and it is hard to see how excluding from full liberal property rights the right to give your wealth to whom you please upon your death would be accomplished without also excluding all sorts of legal devices by which the individual might work around that innovative exclusion. Still, changing the conventions for intestate inheritance would have no such difficulty. So, for example, one might have a lottery in which properties not willed go to whichever citizen's name is drawn from a lottery. Naturally, that would mean more people make a will. But my point is that there is no natural right at hand that intestate inheritance go to family members at all and in the pecking orders of the various states. It is a juncture of convention, notwithstanding the feeling of folks who abhor complexities.
  8. I would not count anything that does not have conscious sensory experience as sentient. That is the condition of some animal forms having nervous systems and connected muscular systems, receiving inputs from the environment and responding (or not) to them. Talking learning machines do not have sentience any more than a daffodil has sentience. Or a kaleidoscope. None.
  9. Erratum: ". . . so I've decided not to retreat from placing the text here."
  10. Michael, reminds me of the argument by Nozick for an entitlement theory of distributive justice, which is process-oriented and includes history and creation of a good, against outcome theories of distributive justice. I think the latter continued to be tops within academia, but with intellectual laity outside academia, I gather Nozick got and retains much traction.
  11. Peter, that 79% number is encouraging. On the other hand: "Asked to name the issue they consider most important in determining who they might support for the nomination, 32% in the potential GOP electorate mention the economy, 16% immigration, and 13% cite specific qualities they’d like to see in a candidate. Fewer name foreign policy (9%), government’s size or spending (7%), or issues related to values, morals and rights (7%)." The 7% on "government size or spending" is discouraging on priorities. I don't get the concern about local law enforcement in a federal case. I had a friend arrested and convicted for a federal crime, and I'm pretty sure the guys who came to arrest him were FBI. There was no media covering that handcuffed man, of course, who was an ordinary citizen, although the neighbors were looking on. If local law enforcement were to assist the FBI, I'd think the FBI would be directing. But I'm getting the impression that, except for possible campaign finance law jeopardy, the possible charges that might come from New York are statutes of that state, and I don't know the how of all the ways local (Florida in assistance to New York?) the FBI might coordinate in this case. Maybe the FBI is out of it altogether. In other words, maybe an indictment from New York on issues in this case are not federal and do not carry federal even in part. Where state campaign finance laws and the federal laws overlap, the federal take precedence if the case concerns a federal election.
  12. Well, that's true, Bill and Michael, it was not that I felt bad, just a little taken aback by the apparent lack of traffic at this site at present. Yesterday, I made a serious post at Objectivism Online, and there were 50 hits within two hours, and I've thought of THEM as having a small audience (about a hundred times the number of active contributors). Of course my initial post in this thread was no serious composition from me, and it has been my experience in general at posting sites that serious contributions over time end up with many clicks. I thought the infinite conversation was a clever feat and amusing. I incline to agree with Michael in the post immediately preceding this one. I gather that this program cannot engage in those thinking conversations I mentioned: well-known dialogues written by well-known philosophers. The dialogue by Galileo could be added, as well as real dialogues such as the written exchanges between Clarke (speaking for Newton) and Leibniz. In the fictional dialogues, real thinking is going on, and I doubt this program can attain that sort of conversation, and I doubt it can reach the sort of critical comments we moderns make concerning those classic dialogues. I don't mean to overrate the level of thought exhibited in such dialogues. The best in philosophic thought is not in such form. Then too, scientific thought from classroom and lab to research and discovery is thought I more highly esteem.
  13. Shared Views over Ability to Win General
  14. Wow! It is now about 48 hours since that post was made, and it has received only 7 hits. Perhaps my reputation for being not likely political preceded it. Then too, perhaps number of different viewers checking out the site is very low at present.
  15. Guyau

    My Verses

    After all the you or me and we are stop, still, done, away: all rush the world old play, their rise, breathe, love their be, their arms, words, eyes hold dawn, race noon, bold burn their turn: all rush the world old play, their rise, breathe, love their be.