Hilary Lawson is right to connect the issue of the completeness and consistency of truth with paradoxes of self-reference. As a kind of summary, consider this story: It was a dark and stormy night,…| Entirely Useless
While I criticized his claim overall, there is some truth in Scott Alexander’s remark that “the predictive processing model isn’t really a natural match for embodiment theory.” Th…| Entirely Useless
In his essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Eugene Wigner says, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation …| Entirely Useless
2 posts published by entirelyuseless during November 2019| Entirely Useless
(Cross posted from the new platform at https://entirelyuseless.substack.com ) I have imported my old blog from WordPress (found at Entirely Useless) and plan to start writing again somewhat regularly, here at Substack. Some would say the decision to write here is just following the current fad, and perhaps there is some truth to that. However, what … Continue reading A New Beginning| Entirely Useless
I was going to use “Artificial Intelligence” in the title here but realized after thinking about it that the idea is really more specific than that. I came up with the idea here while thinking more about the problem I raised in an earlier post about a serious obstacle to creating an AI. As I … Continue reading How to Build an Artificial Human| Entirely Useless
The reader might wonder about the relation between the previous post and my discussion of Arman Razaali. If I could say it is more likely that he was lying than that the thing happened as stated, why shouldn’t they believe the same about my personal account? In the first place there is a question of … Continue reading Prayer and Probability| Entirely Useless
Lies and Scott Alexander Scott Alexander wrote a very good post called Might People on the Internet Sometimes Lie, which I have linked to several times in the past. In the first linked post (Lies, Religion, and Miscalibrated Priors), I answered Scott’s question (why it is hard to believe that people are lying even when … Continue reading Might People on the Internet Sometimes Tell the Truth?| Entirely Useless
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates makes the somewhat odd claim that the ability of people to learn things without being directly told them proves that somehow they must have learned them or known them in advance. While we can reasonably assume this is wrong in a literal sense, there is some likeness of the truth here. … Continue reading What You Learned Before You Were Born| Entirely Useless
Fire vs. Water “All things are water,” says Thales. “All things are fire,” says Heraclitus. “Wait,” says David Hume’s Philo. “You both agree that all things are made up of one substance. Thales, you prefer to call it water, and Heraclitus, you prefer to call it fire. But isn’t that merely a verbal dispute? According … Continue reading Fire, Water, and Numbers| Entirely Useless
Fairy tales and other stories occasionally suggest the idea that a name gives some kind of power over the thing named, or at least that one’s problems concerning a thing may be solved by know…| Entirely Useless
(Cross posted from the new platform at https://entirelyuseless.substack.com )| Entirely Useless
The considerations in the previous posts on predictive processing will turn out to have various consequences, but here I will consider some of their implications for artificial intelligence. In the…| Entirely Useless
St. James says in 1:19-20 of his letter, “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.” What does he mean? …| Entirely Useless
2 posts published by entirelyuseless during August 2020| Entirely Useless
Why are they all blurry? In a recent article, Michael Shermer says about UFOs: UFOlogists claim that extraordinary evidence exists in the form of tens of thousands of UFO sightings. But SETI scient…| Entirely Useless
A few years ago, I quoted Stanley Jaki on an episode supposedly involved Laplace: Laplace shouted, “We have had enough such myths,” when his fellow academician Marc-Auguste Pictet urged, in the ful…| Entirely Useless
At the end of May, OpenAI published a paper on GPT-3, a language model which is a successor to their previous version, GPT-2. While quite impressive, the reaction from many people interested in art…| Entirely Useless
