Today on YouTube I published a recent interview of me by James Ellias on causality, induction, and probability. (James published a different interview of me, on a narrower subject, a few weeks ago on his Inductica channel.) See the interview and description below. How do we build knowledge from the evidence of the senses—and how […]
In my study of artificial intelligence, I have recently learned of an important contemporary philosopher and cognitive scientist who should be of particular interest to students of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts. Although the published work of Ayn Rand predates his published work (and almost all of the voluminous other work that he cites), Peter […]
*perhaps with help from my theory of propositions. This post links to two astonishing chats with ChatGPT. 1. ChatGPT’s Philosophical Detection of Objectivist EpistemologyModel version: ChatGPT 4ohttps://chatgpt.com/share/687c3047-2bcc-800b-bda8-28916181fde4 In this chat, the first two prompts and responses are of mild interest, but my third prompt was, How do you relate a concept to the concrete […]
I took a break from my AI project (a new approach to language models) and my research for a book on ethics to write the following post. In the interest of balanced reporting, it is reasonable for a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or xAI’s Grok to present arguments for honesty and […]
In my last blog post, “Grok is Still Biased, Needs a New Kind of Chain of Thought,” I wrote, The antidote to ideological bias in large language models (LLMs) is a new kind of Chain of Thought, which reasons backwards to identify and scrutinize unstated premises—if necessary, all the way back to first principles. In […]
(Download the 44-page PDF.) Abstract The antidote to ideological bias in large language models (LLMs) is a new kind of Chain of Thought, which reasons backwards to identify and scrutinize unstated premises–if necessary, all the way back to first principles. When considering an argument for a conclusion, a rational thinker does not merely […]
Last year I posted to Rumble an interview of me by Peter McAllister, on the subject of whether reason and science require faith. A friend suggested that I post philosophical videos on YouTube. And so I have started a philosophy channel. The first video is the interview from last year, and the second video is […]
A gold bar is a partially-completed future product that objectively will enhance human life.Sound banking is neither centralized nor a collectivist consensus, but rather individualist. For roughly two decades straddling the last turn of the century, the so-called “Doomsday Argument” was hotly debated in peer-reviewed journals of philosophy—until my 2009 article in Philosophy of Science, […]
Please see this link for a dialogue with ChatGPT—an astounding engineering achievement—on a logical fallacy I have named the “Morning Star Fallacy”: derived from the error of thinking that the morning star and the evening star are two distinct entities, whereas in fact they are the same entity (the planet Venus) at different stages of […]
In February, I applied to–and in March was rejected by–a program at the University of Austin. A question on the application was, Limit: 250 words. In your opinion, what is the most significant issue in the United States (or, if an international applicant, your home country) today? Why? The question is worth pondering by every […]