Computer scientist, applied mathematician. Based in the eastern part of England.
Fan of control theory in general and Perceptual Control Theory in particular. Everyone should know about these, whatever subsequent attitude to them they might reach. These, plus consciousness of abstraction dissolve a great many confusions.
I created the Insanity Wolf Sanity Test. There it is, work out for yourself what it means.
Change ringer since 2022. It teaches learning and grasping abstract patterns, memory, thinking with your body, thinking on your feet, fixing problems and moving on, always looking to the future and letting both the errors and successes of the past go.
As of May 2025, I have yet to have a use for LLMs. (If this date is more than six months old, feel free to remind me to update it.)
Because it reads like an undergraduate essay that regurgitates the ideas from the lectures and the required reading, without any sense that the writer himself is actually thinking about the ideas and trying to decide the truth of anything (which undergraduates in philosophy aren’t supposed to be doing anyway — see Pirsig’s concept of “philosophology”). All that such an essay accomplishes is to show that the student (or AI assistant) has learned the names of the important people and has at least some idea of what they said.
It does not reach much of a conclusion and does not make much of an argument for it. The conclusion seems (because it comes at the end) to be that “We should treat morality as a compelling fiction”. The fictionalism section is suffused with the idea of moral progress, yet the concept is not queried. Whence the “should”, whence the compulsion, and whence the claim of progress? The writer questions all the concepts of morality previously discussed and finds them wanting, but this time the questions go unasked and unanswered.
You could reorder the sections, making any of them the conclusion. All it takes is to not argue against whichever one you put last. Maybe the lecturer is in the fictionalist camp.