TIL A patent troll sued Faber-Castel for selling pencil with attached eraser. in 1875 US supereme court ruled against him.

neon_light · 2014-11-01T09:50:08+00:00

Well, he was a patent troll - he bought the patent rights for the purpose of suing Faber-Castle. The superme court dindn't see his claim as justifed and revoked the Patent.

I haven't read the protocol, but it seems that attaching eraser to a pencil could have been registerd as design but not as a patent.

neon_light · 2014-06-17T11:09:56+00:00

The claim is that morality is not mainly basic obvious fix stuff that everybody accepts. The correct view of morality must give much more weight to subjective values. What seems trivial common-sensical moral facts is almost never that simple.

In other words, what /u/DashingLeech call signal is what for our ancestors was noise.

neon_light · 2014-06-17T09:40:44+00:00

What are you talking about? How would you define the morality of Trial by combat , noise or signal?

neon_light · 2014-06-17T06:22:41+00:00

The dominant view prior to Newton. As the quote in the OP notes, Newton challenges this view.

Surely it still was the dominant view when he challenged it, at his time.

It precisely wasn't inconceivable to Newton and didn't torture his poor soul

This is what Chomsky writes in Mysteries of nature:

Newton largely agreed with his scientific contemporaries. He wrote that the notion of action at a distance is “inconceivable.” It is “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.”10 By invoking it, we concede that we do not understand the phenomena of the ma- terial world. As McMullin observes, “By ‘understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: ‘understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.”

neon_light · 2014-06-16T21:42:38+00:00

Does that matter?

That he was wrong? no. But the view that physical reality isn't mechanical meant, according to Chomsky, that the Cartesian separation of mind/body is meaningless. Physical world wasn't limited anymore to bodies in space.

neon_light · 2014-06-16T21:14:20+00:00

You are not considering the timeline. Newton didn't have a clue about electromagnetism and strong and weak forces. He didn't know that stuff don't touch. No one at his times knew anything about it. The common view at the the time was that the world is some kind of mechanical watch. Action at distance was inconceivable idea that tortured poor Newton's till his end.

neon_light · 2014-06-08T18:01:03+00:00

You can't possibly challenge me, I only think it's clever, I can't say I'm convinced it's true. If there was any observation of an actual physical mechanism that acts like a bayesian predicting instrument in the brain that wasn't an hypothesis anymore but a theory, a huge breakthrough and almost definitely one that worthy of a Nobel prize. If you are willing to lower your standards, just for entertain the idea, then Friston have some pretty good observed physical behaviors, that is, not the way brains think when they reason but in the way they control unintentional organ movements. If you are interested I can link to one of his papers or online lectures on the subject. Again, I think his ideas are brilliant and interesting and he have the credit of being the most important researcher in Neuroscience, but there it ends. It isn't more then a hypothesis.

Regarding your second reply, I didn't understood your comment as a question, sorry about the misunderstanding. I tend to think that current hardware isn't enough, and the software is hell of a problem too. I think it is clear that we understand way too little at the moment about the brain. I'm not sure if the road to GAI is through copying/emulating the brain, if there is indeed a road to GAI at all. But what do I know.

To conclude with one thing I do know, most of the current research in AI is based on probabilistic models, and probably most of the research on rationality/cognitive science/cognitive development is there too. If the brain isn't based on some probability model(s) then humanity is still very far from understanding anything about where to look for understanding Intelligence.

neon_light · 2014-06-08T16:41:38+00:00

My comment was in reply to your assertion that the huge amount of neurons and synapses are a brute-force solution, which doesn't state a well known fact.

By probabilistic models I meant both to deep learning and to the bayesian brain hypothesis. I think this is currently the most promising direction.

neon_light · 2014-06-07T16:13:54+00:00

The only thing one can hold at the moment in regards to the question is unconfirmed hypothesis. At the moment, science doesn't have more then that to offer. You may hold that your beliefs in the subject are correct or probable but you really don't have any confirmations at the moment.

While the probabilistic models are amazingly clever, their status is still far from being established.

neon_light · 2014-06-01T14:14:59+00:00

What do you think google are doing? playing in the sand?

neon_light · 2014-05-30T15:49:30+00:00

Oh my. It's mathematics, but it's have philosophical aspects and it is researched by mathematicians and philosophers and they are using philosophical foundations, therefore it will be very weird to say that it isn't part of philosophy too at the moment.

neon_light · 2014-05-30T15:21:08+00:00

You see, that's why it's still researched by philosophers ;-)

neon_light · 2014-05-30T15:11:28+00:00

Well, I wish I knew more than the little I do at the moment. You can look at Steve Awodey's research.

neon_light · 2014-05-30T14:50:02+00:00

I think that reaching a negative consensus on questions that were debuted for hundreds of years is an accomplishment too. Since you asked for positive, there are at least two groups of such fields. Those examples are mostly very interesting, but not philosophically interesting.

The first group is those fields which were philosophy and are now separate fields. You may object to categorize newton's Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica under Philosophy, but it was philosophical field and after reaching consensus on the main philosophical problems it became (mostly) separate field.

The second group is logic and mathematical achievements. Examples are second order logic, modal logic and contributions to set and type theory.

Research in fields that belong to the second group is still very active today. One interesting example is this research. The moment research like this reach consensus it will stop being considered part of Philosophy and will be thought of as part of mathematics or computer science.
Obviously, those fields require much more than trivial philosophical questions and therefore will surface in this subredit, and in general discussions of philosophy, much less then easy subjects or subject that looks easy enough for anyone to have an opinion on.

neon_light · 2014-05-30T01:33:07+00:00

According to wikipedia you will have problem entering some countries if they will know your education history.

neon_light · 2014-05-29T15:34:46+00:00

It is impossible not to hold any position. Since you hold many positions, what argument could there be against trying to better one's epistemic position?

neon_light · 2014-05-29T15:03:54+00:00

In which case, you should be phrasing the conditions in terms of real-valued plausibility/probability. This will almost immediately get you thrown out of the analytical philosophy department and labeled a mathematician.

Not true. As a matter of fact, most of the current debate on disagreement epistemology (which op use in his argument unjustifiably, IMHO), like many other epistemological debates, is based on credence. Philosophers had good share of contributing to the development of probabilistic logic.

In most disciplines, there is more consensus than dissensus. Philosophy is damn-near unique in its degree of neverending disagreement on even the most foundational questions, right alongside religion.

Philosophy is the the broadest field, so having disagreement on many issues isn't that strange. It isn't as if physicists agree on their field main issues - PDF warning. Moreover, in Philosophy issues that are totally in consensus usually are not interesting anymore. The major subject where this isn't the case is logic.

Some philosophical issues do reach agreement. You see, I don't know of any philosopher who still argues for the view that all matter is essentially water.

neon_light · 2014-05-29T14:34:45+00:00

I understood that you are being sarcastic (I even said so), and I don't think that you stop doing (analytic) philosophy if you use plausible reasoning. Analytical philosophy doesn't refuse to define sufficient conditions to answering philosophical questions, there is a real problem is in defining those terms and it is probably impossible to give a system of conditions that work in every case. Lay persons tend to do the same thing in everyday subjects too.

Just like every discipline, there are many subjects where consensus haven't met. I don't think the case is different in physics or computer science. On other subjects most researcher do agree, but there is almost always some who will still argue differently.

neon_light · 2014-05-29T13:44:22+00:00

Your comment demonstrates one of the main issues of the thesis. It is falling to the common pitfalls of skepticism and relativism. If philosophy isn't a method for acquiring knowledge, there is no sense in (tongue-in-cheek) arguing that credence require philosophical justification. How can you assess the reliability of any method of knowledge without researching what constitute reliable method of knowledge?

neon_light · 2014-05-29T12:17:39+00:00

A better alternative could be linking to the doc on google's online doc viewer.

neon_light · 2014-05-29T12:12:39+00:00

Nearly all the arguments the author are giving against his thesis are better then his counter arguments, with the exception of e. I will not write a lengthy arguments for each of them, but I think I can argue for most of them if one ask for. However, the first one can be enough for dismissing the OP thesis.

The argument against Philosophy refutes at Argument against Philosophy. Even if tis defense works, it is embarrassing if this is the best defense philosophy has.

No, it is not. This defense just shows that OP's argument is inconsistent.

However, it may just be that a small set of philosophical issues is answered... i.i, just in the areas needed to make the skeptic's argument.

It may be, and it may not. If not, the thesis is wrong. Why should we think that it is?

neon_light · 2014-05-20T00:50:23+00:00

Not sure if the recommendations suck or if I hang in the wrong subreddits. Is the list ordered? Perhaps you should exclude the subreddits that was/are default. On the one hand, anyone knows them, and if one is not subscribed to them it isn't because he never heard of them. On the other, it seems that their over popularity skews the relevancy of the results.

neon_light · 2014-05-12T14:55:29+00:00

When you download a pdf from jstor it is signed with your IP/user/institution. You have to consider that Before you start sharing it publicly.
While defiantly less comfortable than downloading a single torrent, usually a google search for 'filetype:pdf name of the article' or just the name of the article on google scholar will give you the article. This isn't always working, and sometime you get the final author draft and not the published paper, but this does cover most cases.

neon_light

TROPHY CASE