Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

> Yes, they do.

You ignored the part of the statement where I then said (to then say "And this is why the world should be switch to socialism" or "this is why you should be a vegan".)

> Plenty of abstract mathematical concepts have zero connection to anything in nature or in the physical world.

Ok, and whether or not we say that this mathematical model is "real" or not, in some abstract sense, will not result in the mathematician telling me to be a vegan.

Basically, I can say "sure, your math model is real, in your own self defined axiom, but I can simply not care, or change any behavior, and thats fine".

> that your argument rests upon the simple fact of calling their arguments circular

So, the point of calling them circular, is that the philosophers I am referring to, aren't happy with me saying "Those are just axioms that you have. Sure, whatever, they are 'true' in a way that doesn't matter at all, outside of your own set of made up axioms, and if I don't have your axioms then I can simply not care, and there is nothing provable wrong with that".

The problematic philosophers I am talking about are the ones who are not just saying "here is a set of consistent axioms". Instead, the problamatic ones I am talking about are the ones who say "These axioms are true, because the universe said so, and therefore you should be a socialist/vegan/ancap/whatever", and they pretend like that is the same thing as using some chemistry knowledge, that is used to make rocketships.

> Nobody said you "have to listen" to anyone. You don't have to listen to scientists, mathematicians, ect

If I don't listen to scientists, or mathematicians, when trying to build a rocketship, then my rocketship might explode.

If I don't listen to a philosopher's argument about how a dualism magic soul exists, nothing happens. No rockets explode. I just make the philosopher upset that I am not becoming a vegan because they think the universe proves their axioms correct.

> could equally apply to any other discipline with 'circular' axioms, such as physics

Once again, thats fine! Because if we say that some set of untestable axioms isn't real, the physicist isn't going to get upset, and say that I am evil for not supporting whatever political argument they are making, because the universe proves them true. Its all just axioms. Mine are just as good as theirs. Philosophers have no authority on any of this.

> You're assuming your own axioms here.

Hey we've finally gotten there! Thats fine! Lets just say it is axioms all the way down, and nobody should listen to someone claiming that their axioms are proved to be true by the laws of the universe.

Thats the difference. I am not going to go around claiming that the universe proves my axioms. You have axioms. I have axioms. And philosophers have axioms. And just because someone is a philosopher, it does not mean that they can then wield that, and say that the universe proves their axioms true, and therefore thats why I have to support policy X or Y.

Just call it all axioms, and admit that philosophers aren't any better than anyone else's set of circular axioms, and call it a day!

Thanks for the recommendation!

I think people often conflate consciousness with the perception of consciousness (or consciousness of consciousness, or meta-consciousness).

Imagine a being that is "conscious* of some experience, but lacks the ability of reflecting about the fact that it has just witnessed an experience. Is such a being "conscious"? Answers will vary but I suspect they vary because people are answering different questions. Some are thinking about the meta-consciousness and some about direct consciousness.

> Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted".

Ah, here is the disconnect, and where you would be wrong. What you are describing is called moral anti-realism.

And yes, if all a philosopher is doing, is saying "given a set of unjustified axioms, that we are assuming, this is what follows" then I have no problem with this line of thinking.

The problem that I have, is that the majority of philosophical thought these days, is for moral realism.

They don't just have axioms. Instead, they think the universe itself proves their axioms to be true, and if you disagree with their axiom, you are just as much of a science denier as if you questioned a different expert in a different field.

If only philosophers just admitted that they just had axioms like everyone else.

> It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions

Sure. As I stated in part of one of my posts, if we just want to say that philosophy is a useful way of thinking, then that's fine. Just don't say it is the same as the universe proving your axioms true.

> Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct?

It's called moral realism. Most philosophers are moral realists these days. They literally believe that their moral axioms are true, in a epistemological sense. (Veganism is just an example of one such moral statement that many make)

You can pick any famous moral realist, and that will be mostly the case for them.

I had a feeling you'd bring up moral realism, and you're somewhat correct; it's not a necessary feature of moral realism, however, and most philosophers arguing for moral realism have stronger arguments than "that's just the way it is", which usually appeal to our intuitions about other non-moral facts, such as "this chair exists" or "I have two hands". It's up to you whether those arguments are successful, but it doesn't do anyone favours to dismiss them out of hand as you are doing. If they were so patently ridiculous, I doubt many philosophers would believe them. If they make sense by relying on our intuitions about other facts of the universe, I can see why many philosophers believe them.

If you have a solid argument aganist moral realism, I'd like to hear it, even though I'm familiar with most of the arguments for moral anti-realism, and I generally sit on the anti-realist side of the fence these days. But it does yourself a disservice to say that all such arguments are circular and logically invalid. I quite like this argument from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral realism:

"In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do. But they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims."