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This is a positive claim. Just because I can say "I don't believe that God doesn't exist" doesn't just UNO reverse the burden of proof. Mystery is mystery.
Affirmation and negation aren't linguistic properties of phrases, but logical properties of mathematical propositions regarding their specificity or non-specificity vis-à-vis a universe.
I don't see how the fact that a tool can or can't produce my opinion or another has any bearing on its truth value.
You may say that this makes me useless to you or something, but not only is that completely irrelevant, I don't really care?
Look, attacking someone's character and accusing them of credentialism for defending themselves isn't exactly a novel stratagem.
It's vacuous nonetheless. I'm here to discuss the matter at hand. If I wanted to do bullshit name calling I'd go on twitter.
Lies.
A pragmatist would't speculate, as you do.
You seem to desperately want to equate my position with that of other people who are very certain about the nature of things. Zelots tend to do this, and to think that anyone who doesn't believe what they're saying must believe a different kind of thing as absolutely.
I don't. I just think you're overtly enthusiastic about technological progress and that this blinds you, as it has blinded many others, to the ever present limitations of engineering and nature.
You're buying the hype, like I've seen countless other people buy various forms of it over the years. And like all of them you will be disappointed.
This is not to say that the technological changes we are living are not momentous and important. But their prediction is beyond us. And had you more humility you too would recognize it. For that is in fact the essence of pragmatism.
This is why I compare you to an LLM (don't get too offended though, we're all in the same boat). Incoherence: you object on the linguistic level while calling me out for the same. I do not claim to believe X or even not-believe X: I just claim ¬X, where X is the unspecified extra factor you posit when saying things like «nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia… The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence» etc. and demand high-effort refutation for. X is the extraordinary claim, the epicycle, and that which has to be proven (or «dismissed without evidence»), under the standard of rigor you propose.
More precisely, my statement is a syllogism which we could write down like this: «We know the process by which B produces its outputs; there is no appreciable qualitative advantage in output quality of A over B. Ergo there is no reason to suspect that some process X, qualitatively superior or more complex to B-processes, is utilized to produce A's outputs». A is your human cognition that you presumably employ to generate posts; B is computation performed by an LLM at inference, which is in turn analogized to the computational (to wit, materialistic) model of the human mind C. Swapping B for C preserves the logic even if A, B and C are all very different things.
My reference to belief is simply in line with your «disbelieving things always requires less evidence than believing them» wording of the burden-of-proof principle, and also because I don't particularly want to debate your or GPT's output quality as subjectively assessed by either of us, but aim to point out the fruitlessness of this burden tennis epistemological judo.
By the casual standard of discourse, I make the negative claim that there is no X demonstrated well enough to merit debate; you tie yourself in knots to equivocate between parsimonious materialistic and exuberant supernatural claims on the level of pure language games. Neither of us has proposed a mathematical formalism for the issue under consideration. If you want to show how your position is closer to null by that high standard, feel free to.
Recall the tobacco-and-cancer skeptic guy? Conspicuous uncertainty about a specific issue or a hypothesis can boil down to certainty, just of a particularly irritating two-faced kind. And you do not even claim to be an even-handed agnostic. E.g. you say:
The «supposedly» gives the lie to another layer of skeptical agnosticism you retreat to here. And indeed:
They aren't; mortality of living beings is not more surprising nor requiring additional explanation than the fact that stuff breaks and decays in general (admittedly a hard theological problem, and a shame, but not perplexing in the context of known physics); even evolution of aging and death is relatively well understood and has nothing to do with consciousness (very simple organisms believed to be non-conscious by all sans fringe panpsychists often age and die too). As you admit yourself, this is pointless arguing, not inquiry; but you are intent to drag results of inquiry down to the same level.
In the absence of common metaphysical prior, parsimony is a pretty good criterion to go by. ¬X is more parsimonious than what you offer.
I'm cognizant of limitations of engineering and nature. I'm simply skeptical that nature has a great deal of advantage over current engineering in the realm of implementing human-level behaviorally expressed cognition – because I don't see how that advantage could come about, don't see a single damn argument for why it should exist, and crucially just don't see the advantage.
Vaticination on top of psychologizing is the opposite of humility, though, and a loud prognosticator preaching humility is always a sad sight. But that's okay, I don't ask you to be humble. Me, I admit not being particularly humble – nor smart, not knowledgeable or insightful or appropriately educated or possessing any other cool status. I'm just confident that my arguments are correct because they are non-contradictory, supported by empirical data and not in conflict with any data I've found.
That's enough for me.
There's no extra factor, I'm just observing something that isn't explained by your theory, through experience itself.
I don't know whether you experience the same phenomenon I do, and frankly that doesn't really matter. Cartesianism isn't a language trick, it's describing something that's just categorically true which I can test right now.
This premise is unsubstantiated, is my whole argument.
You're what some philosophers of science call a naïve empiricist in that you deny the existence of a priori knowlege and think that all that can be known can be derived from observation of the natural world and its processes alone.
It is not surprising that you'd find yourself at odds with people like Hynkla and myself who are ostensibly related to mathematics, because math is the most solid and evident form of apriori knowledge we have.
But crucially, qualia is also among that category. Which is why I'm helplessly trying to make you understand that a completely material model of the world is insufficient and flawed and you're most likely never going to agree because you either don't feel the same way I do about experience or you refuse to examine the Cartesian argument critically because materialism is foundational to all that you know to be true, and that's a big ask.
See, who gives a shit about things being advantageous, I want to know what is true.
As for aspersions about my selective skepticism, I resent that. I get in enough arguments about metaphysics with enough people with wildly different opinions to at least be afforded the charity that I'm genuine in my pessimism about the possibility of knowledge.
To start with, I'm always biffing with naive rationalists who believe the exact inverse of what you do, and are also overtly confident in their certainty.
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