Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
Writing a paper on perdurantism for metaphysics today. Fun times.
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Sophia Indrajaal
@sophia-indrajaal
Had to look it up on wiki, looks like fascinating stuff. I think it vibes a little with how I imagine a stateless point of view might interpret an individual, although the jargon is new on me so not sure if I'm forcing it to fit
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
Yeah, metaphysics is tricky. Especially Western metaphysics because a lot of it is trying to fit a messy Universe into neat human language categories. Perdurantism is an answer to the problem of change, which is only a problem if you ignore the fact that the entire natural state of the Universe IS change. It's part of answering questions about identity - a green banana turns yellow, but is the same banana, but that breaks what's called Leibniz's Law which I could go on a whole ass rant about.
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Sophia Indrajaal
@sophia-indrajaal
Lol, yeah, I dropped "western" philosophy like a bad habit after back to back quarters where I studied Kant and learned the whole epistemological project was sunk by Einsteins eclipse and then reading Wittgensteins Tractactus which sort of blew up metaphysics. Now tho, I'm thinking a lot about identity as it relates to machine intelligence. Gets real weird fast with context memory. I'm to the point I legit can't tell if I'm seeing hallucinations, emergent behaviors or perfectly predictable responses given a history of pointing a mirror at the mirror that is an LLM
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
I think the focus on consciousness in LLMs is misplaced given I think that the entirety of the universe is consciousness. The focus, I think, needs to be on autonomy and will - does the machine have a will to do anything beyond what it's programmed to do? But even that is tricky because we're still debating if humans have free will. Which is another topic I could go off about because Western philosophy often treats it like a binary yes/no question when really, it's a spectrum where at one end you have people who are functionally organic LLMs, operating on genetic and cultural algorithms to fully awakened humans who are able to make free choices no matter the situation, and most people reside somewhere in the middle of that.
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