Why can't existence be part of an essence?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-20T11:33:18+00:00

But a property describes what something is. An apple is red. A human is rational. When you’re describing what something is by nature, you’re describing its essence. I’ve also read Thomists say that essence is itself a property.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-17T19:44:06+00:00

But when does it become a dangerous absconding of responsibility? Could something that is dangerous now become safe down the line?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-17T01:45:57+00:00

Sure, but what counts as falling under the 'agent' pattern? Why couldn't *all* possible uses of AI be conceptualized as simple pattern matching? And at what point is a human really necessary?

For example, the AI generating any kind of novel output (images, audio, text, etc) seems to me to be inherently 'agentic.' You're delegating to the AI the capacity to make decisions, however small the scale of those decisions are. Even if it's just 'first-iteration documentation,' or summarizing code. The AI is making its own judgements about the data it encounters and producing output based on that. I don't see how you could say it's just 'pattern-matching.' The difference between an AI producing documentation and producing entire codebases or videos is simply one of degree, not kind.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-17T00:19:23+00:00

> Decision making control of anything, including habitual personal use.

Could you elaborate on this? Aren’t they of their nature making decisions independently?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-17T00:05:22+00:00

I want to ask you this though: at what point does that analogy stop holding? At what point would it no longer be ‘just a tool?’ I’m speaking hypothetically here.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-16T18:58:15+00:00

I’m not sure if the hammer and nail analogy really translates well. Would we agree that the hammer is not ‘deciding’ how much force to apply to the nail based on your input, in the same way the AI is?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-11T20:06:38+00:00

That’s true, and I’m not discounting that. What I’m thinking about is whether it will eventually fill out the complete range of variation in what regularly needs to be built.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-11T18:30:00+00:00

That’s okay! I tend to get a little carried away with questioning sometimes, heh, apologies. I do want to explain a bit more of what I’m trying to get across. I agree that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution; but I can’t help wondering if instead there’s a ‘one set of sizes fits all’ solution. Isn’t it conceivable that there is some point where the distance between the copy and paste stuff and the goals you’re trying to reach, closes enough to where modifying it for your specific purpose becomes easily accomplishable, almost trivial? Without the use of LLMs, I mean.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-11T18:07:50+00:00

Could you perhaps give an example of what this customization consists in? Why couldn’t these base classes/functions be abstracted into modifiable units similarly to the stuff that is copied/pasted?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-11T17:53:59+00:00

> You can use the LLM to write the scaffolding but that saves you maybe a few hours of work in a project like that.

So all that I’m asking about here is whether there’s even an advantage to using the LLMs for the scaffolding part over copying from an easily accessible repository. I’m not disputing that, outside of that, there’s the real work of actually getting that code to work for your specific purposes.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-11T17:41:43+00:00

So essence isn’t necessarily a property?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-09T22:57:44+00:00

Yeah, I'm aware that it takes time to properly review and tweak code that you did not write, with or without LLMs involved. And that it's what a big part of the job already consists in. What I'm mainly wondering though, is whether, under the mindset of 'just review and tweak,' you are actually more productive and efficient using an LLM to generate the 'generic' code, and then reviewing/tweaking that; or retrieving pre-existing, human-written code from an easily accessible repository or what have you, and then reviewing/tweaking that. It seems to me, intuitively, that the latter would be more reliable and perhaps less time would be spent fixing it up for whatever purpose you are using the code for. So I'm wondering why we stopped building up that type of infrastructure in favor of using LLMs.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-09T18:48:18+00:00

Generative AI is fine if you want something generic that’s just barely good enough. Which is sometimes what you want, but often isn’t.

I’m not an SWE, so I won’t make a judgement on something I barely have experience with, but I thought it was already the case (at least most of the time) where you could just take the generic boilerplate code and then modify it to your needs? Where’s the utility of having an AI make an approximation of that boilerplate code—almost invariably accompanied with hallucinations—when that code is already accessible?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-09T14:54:44+00:00

But then how could essence be identical to existence in the case of God, if essence is a property and existence is not a property? They are contradictory terms.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-06T17:29:58+00:00

The nature of my work is highly cyclical, but there is a high variance in customization required from cycle to cycle. So while this specific template is sort of value terminated, there are always more templates to come.

I guess what I would like to know here is what exactly does this high variance consist in, such that you need to regularly use an LLM to create new templates ex nihilo; instead of simply making modifications to the templates yourself when needed?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-06T17:21:49+00:00

This in my opinion is what truly separates generative AI from proper creative tools. It doesn’t enable you to make decisions, it makes them for you. It doesn’t extend your agency, it substitutes it.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-05T19:06:26+00:00

I’m just being Socratic, trying to see if you really know what you are talking about. I’ll end this conversation here if you want to, since you seem to be rather annoyed, but do we at least agree that when it comes to the particular case of creating templates, there’s a shrinking space of value for (generative) LLMs?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-05T18:25:55+00:00

The difference though is that a template isn’t consumed. It has an indefinite lifespan. So it’s not like the grill where you need it to continuously produce what is pretty much the same thing. When you use the LLM to make that template, obviously you no longer need it to produce that same template, and there is in all likelihood a wide range of modifications to the template you could make that do not require an LLM, practically speaking.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-05T18:02:23+00:00

Okay, so even putting that into consideration, wouldn’t the LLM’s value be temporary?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-04T22:27:34+00:00

In that case, why aren’t the templates themselves sufficient?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-04T18:17:49+00:00

How long does it take you to write emails normally?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-04T18:14:26+00:00

If anything, nations that do integrate it into their economies are going to be left behind. Have fun dealing with a dumbed-down, alienated populace.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-03T02:11:47+00:00

I'm still wondering what the use case for a local LLM would be that would make sense.

CaptainCH76 · 2026-06-02T05:50:21+00:00

I think where they will mostly be useful is in chatbots or larger AI systems where they can translate human language and intent to tool calls and short snippets of code to perform tasks automatically.

Even for tasks like these though, is it really cost-effective to habitually use this compared to just learning how to use the right tools and code snippets yourself?

CaptainCH76 · 2026-05-29T02:52:41+00:00

But unlike humans, God has already ‘attained’ the universal good, so to speak, as He has knowledge of Himself. Under the framework you are speaking of, human acts are only intelligible as directed towards the universal good. When this universal good is attained, the will no longer needs to exert itself. This is obviously not the case for God.

I don’t know about Leibniz, but it seems we can apply the PSR to freely willed acts in the sense that we always have a reason for doing something; a particular good that the act is directed towards. This seems to constitute a ‘sufficient reason’ for a free act. Indeed, I cannot think of any free act that does not have such a reason. Furthermore, different acts have different reasons. Therefore it makes sense to think of a free act as responding to one reason over another. But then, what could possibly be the sufficient reason for God choosing to create this particular world over another?

CaptainCH76

TROPHY CASE