Also, you can't loan or borrow electronic books. — T Clark

You can actually. Many books on internet archive (one example website of many) are borrow only. Meaning that access to a particular ebook is time limited and the pdf isn't available for download (or it's encrypted).

Personally I prefer, and indeed have, a nice wall of dead trees.

Waves don't think.

And now on version 4 of chatGPT they charge the gullible punter $$ to use. A bastardisation of openAI indeed — invicta

I don't think you understand how much money it costs to host a service like chatgpt. Iirc 5 days after it opened to the public it had over a million users. The statistics now are absolutely insane. It's not feasible for openai to be an unpaid service.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-chatgpt-costs-openai-to-run-estimate-report-2023-4?r=US&IR=T

Chatbot-GPT is a useful tool that I see replacing the current state of search engines. I've been using chatgpt as a way to get more understandable c++ compile time error messages. I even pasted in complex template code from the GCC standard library (deque.tcc) and asked chatgpt to explain each part to me. It did so with ease. The potential for chatgpt as a tool to streamline learning and aid developers is huge.


It's better than current search engine implementations because it retains state. Which means that response to queries can be adjust and 'trained' to fit a particular line of question. Stupid example would be:

User: "I have such and such ingredients. Give me a recipe"
Chatgpt: "here is a list of recipes blah blah blah"
User: "but change those recipes to not include tomatoes"
Chatgpt: "sure blah blah blah"


This is a trivial example but the general concept of stateful queries is a powerful tool. I expect Google and the others will find a way to integrate ai into their engines (bing already does and Google is working on its own thing called lamda).

Oh yeah. Well that's a shame..

Banned Olivier5 for persistently attempting to derail a thread with accusations of trolling and so on, refusing to stop when I asked.. — Jamal

Which thread?

It's good to have a free-for-all section.

It doesn't even occur in certain other languages, where the concatenation of a predicate and a noun will suffice — Banno

Interesting

Truly ineffable

It's the distinction between logical truth and soundness that often feels wrong.

There is no qualifier for existential questions — Shawn

Who am I under normal circumstances?

Why should one try? What's wrong with resignation and sadness?
I hate Smile Culture! — Vera Mont

There's middle-ground.

Absolutely. It's not flawless but it gives accurate enough output to be useful. The same way Google translate is flawed yet useful to language learners.

LP is correspondence gone wrong. Astrology is coherentism gone wrong.

Yep: I'm not sure if this was intended as a counter-example, but I actually think that it is a good example: for one thing, you could come up with a worse summary of the realist/anti-realist debate RE abstract objects than the dispute between those who think that e.g. numbers exist "only in the mind" and those who do not. — busycuttingcrap

I don't follow how you can say:

X exists in the mind
∴ X doesn't exist

How is it therefore, that we make use of something that doesn't exist (numbers)?

Also, conspiracy theories do exist. That's why we can talk about them.

And colloquially, to say that something exists only as a concept in your mind is simply a different way of saying that something doesn't exist (consider: a conspiracy theory, an imaginary friend, etc) — busycuttingcrap

Numbers?

I agree that non-existent things don't exist, and that there shouldn't be a special category of existence for non-existent things. If we accept Bertrand Russell"s On Denoting, then I also agree that Santa Claus is not a referring expression, but rather a quantificational expression.

For Russell, existence is not a first-order property of individuals but instead a second-order property of concepts. — RussellA

Hey! That's what I said (Frege and Russel were in concurrence here). I tend to agree with this line of thinking.

Consideration of concepts (or their status) is perhaps relevant in the analysis of the existence predicate. Frege maintained that existence wasn't a first order predicate because that could entail absurdities like "There is an x such that x doesn't exist". Frege held rather, that existence is a second order predicate: a property of concepts, not individuals. This existence property can be instantiated or not.

A. Santa does not exist.
B. The property of being santa is not instantiated by any individual object — Heracloitus

I beg your pardon, but would you prefer to splinter off the discussion you both had into a seperate thread about the distinction of concepts from ideas and use as traditionally utilized by Wittgenstein? — Shawn

Consideration of concepts (or their status) is perhaps relevant in the analysis of the existence predicate. Frege maintained that existence wasn't a first order predicate because that could entail absurdities like "There is an x such that x doesn't exist". Frege held rather, that existence is a second order predicate: a property of concepts, not individuals. This existence property can be instantiated or not.

A. Santa does not exist.
B. The property of being santa is not instantiated by any individual object


Here is the relevant SEP entry.

You might find this irrelevant. Depends how you want to analyse "exists".

My chickens are conscious, but they don't say much. — Banno

You just don't understand the clucks.

Look at it like this, ask a scientist what existence is, and she will put the answer in the range of material substance, naturalism, the stuff atoms, quarks, and so on are made of, etc. This is a scientist's ontology. A phenomenologist will say terms like this are fine in contexts where they are common and make sense, but for philosophical ontology material substance has no meaning. I mean, what is it? for there is nothing there to fill the explanatory space. It is really just an extension of a scientist's vocabulary into a philosophical claim, but it has no empirical presence.

Phenomenology, the way I see it, simply takes what appears before us as the foundation for philosophical inquiry. In doing this, it grounds theory in what is there, simply put. Its historical precursor is Kant's "concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind." — Constance

But science is useful. Phenomenology is philosophically unproductive and useless.

I'm still learning about normal logic systems, but yep interesting stuff. Has been applied in computer science (true, false and undefined).

Another example is Lukasiewicz's 'future contingent':

I can assume without contradiction that my presence in Warsaw at a certain moment of next year, e.g., at noon on 21 December, is at the present time determined neither positively nor negatively. Hence it is possible, but not necessary, that I shall be present in Warsaw at the given time. On this assumption the proposition “I shall be in Warsaw at noon on 21 December of next year,” can at the present time be neither true nor false. For if it were true now,
my future presence in Warsaw would have to be necessary, which is contradictory to the assumption. If it were false now, on the other hand, my future presence in Warsaw would have to be impossible,
which is also contradictory to the assumption. Therefore the proposition considered is at the moment neither true nor false and must possess a third value, different from “0” or falsity and “1” or truth. This value we can designate by “1/2.” It represents “the possible,” and joins “the true” and “the false” as a third value. — Lukasiewicz

Principle of bivalence: There are only 2 truth values (true and false; a proposition is either true or false, but neither both nor neither) — Agent Smith

Tertium non datur

It's more that the expression has no referent that is the issue — Banno

Right but isn't the fact that it has no referent due to the context-sensitive nature of the proposition? 'Present king of france' seems to be a temporal indexical-phrase to me. I am aware of Kaplan but haven't yet looked into his work.

But consider "The present king of France is bald". There isn't a present king of France. Is "The present king of France is bald" true, or is it false? Or is it something else? — Banno

Are there any logical systems dealing with indexicals?

This ineffable thread surely is effing along nicely

Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake — T Clark

Yep there is nothing quite like this trilogy.

No one can say anything about the experience of red. It is ineffable — hypericin

Redness is always experienced as an attribute of a particular. Voilà, I said something about the experience of red.

Yeah time is modular on a 12-hour clock.

Lord Foul's Bane
by Stephen R. Donaldson — Pantagruel

Nice to see this show up here. I have the whole set of Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. One of my favourite antiheroes :smile:

@keystone

You might be interested in Norman Wildberger on YouTube. He seems to hold positions on infinity similar to yours.

Godidit" is babytalk. — 180 Proof

Babies are not as stupid as you think

Well yes Buddhists do not typically accept Jesus as their lord and saviour. If you want to make the case that Buddhism pulls one towards Christianity in an indirect (and therefore fuzzy) way, by means of drawing one's mind towards metaphysical or "spiritual" matters, then the claim (that x can pull one towards Christianity) can stand for almost anything. It's too broad, too vague.

I've lurked this forum since it's inception and have seen many of streetlights interactions with others over the years. The fact is that street often let his emotions come through in his posts in a negative fashion, but he also brought a great deal of quality and insight to the forum. This explains the ambivalent responses to his being banned.

Personally I had friendly and helpful interactions with him. He spoke passionately with me (via PM) about continental philosophy, especially deleuze, and I consider it a real shame for the forum to lose someone who can contribute to those types of discussions.

If this was a democracy I'd vote clemency.

I already made the point that it's pure speculation. Can you read?

Two people not knowing makes a "we".

You neither.

We don't know. Anything else is speculative.

This [ desire for a single complete resolution (PI, #91) ]--"as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light... [ finds expression in questions about essence ] ...not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but [ we imagine ] something that lies beneath the surface... something that lies within, which we see [ only ] when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out." PI, #92 This is the human compulsion to "penetrate" (PI, #90) the world by way of knowledge that Wittgenstein is turning from in glancing sideways at what is essential about a thing by examining what Kant would call its "conditions"; that our ordinary expressions reveal what something can be (is possible of, and limited to). — Antony Nickles

Excuse my ignorance. Are you claiming that Witty was in favour of ordinary language philosophy?

and ctrl Z for us peasants

Plenty of discussion taking place on this forum that has nothing to do with religion. You could engage with that but you prefer to enter into threads about religion to proclaim how much you dislike religion. Leave / stay. Your choice. /Shrugs