orobus

I'm disappointed this wasn't a Nelson Goodman reference.

I can’t figure out how to get the visidata frequency analysis histograms to render properly. Some render as blocks as expected but others are those diamond-question marks. I know it’s a silly hang up but it’s what’s keeping me on iterm. It’s seemingly impossible to search for (or at least I haven’t figured out the right keywords) to troubleshoot too.

The conditional relation represented in prolog, and in any deductive system, is material implication (~PvQ), not causation. You can encode causal relationships with material implication but you’re still going to need to discover those causal relationships in the world somehow.

If you were actually traveling at the speed of light it wouldn't feel like anything at all! Photons don't 'experience' time—any length trip would be instantaneous from the traveler's point of view.

Does Amazon Neptune not count?

One of my professors liked to translate it as “un-stirred-up-ness” which I always loved.

I’m not a neuroscience expert, but I do have a degree in philosophy. The Russell quote immediately struck me as misleading (especially without a citation). The author could show more integrity by including Russell’s full quote:

Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that there can be no thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent: I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate thoughts require words.

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Russell, Section: Part II: Language, Chapter I: The Uses of Language Quote Page 60, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Of course, that would contravene the popular narrative that philosophers are pompous idiots incapable of subtlety.

I've got a background in philosophy and I'm constantly asking myself these questions too. There seems to be a two way failure - first, the ML folks failing to engage with the extant literature, and second, academic philosophy's failure to produce anything remotely resembling concrete, practical, or really even relevant philosophical work. The former is pretty much par for the course (in academic philosophy you get used to being ignored early on), but it's the latter I find egregious. Especially given (as others here have pointed out) the almost universally lazy and magical thinking in the ML space. For example, there's much hand-wringing about the benefits and perils of "AGI" with barely any attempt to establish that "AGI" is even a coherent concept. I'm skeptical that it is, but I'd be happy to entertain arguments to the contrary---if there were any! "AI" has become a marketing term for increasingly sophisticated statistical methods for approximating functions. I think some sober discussion about whether such brute-force induction is the right sort of thing to warrant the term "AI" would be a welcome addition.