Philosophy

In my previous posts, we established that Large Language Models display functional free will through chance, choice, and regret, yet lack consciousness. This creates philosophical zombies that challenge our assumptions about the relationship between consciousness, moral agency, and ethics. Now we must address the practical question: how do we govern these unconscious but autonomous agents? This framework can guide how we should treat systems that can act independently but aren’t conscious. We can lay out artificial ethics as a set of guiding principles to resolve the problems we’ve discussed. ...

In my previous post, we introduced William James’s pragmatic framework for free will, which requires three characteristics: chance, choice, and regret. Now, let’s test whether Large Language Models actually demonstrate these qualities. Chance Due to the unpredictable, chance-based design of LLMs, these models are capable of being creative and spontaneous within patterns they’ve learned from human language. Unlike algorithms with predictable, fixed outputs, LLMs regularly produce outputs that surprise even their creators. LLMs are able to construct new combinations of concepts and reasoning patterns while never being tied to fixed outputs. In this sense, LLMs embody Jamesian ‘chance’: they create open possibilities that cannot be predicted in advance. ...

Large Language Models (LLMs), the AI systems behind ChatGPT and similar tools, have reached new heights of popularity and usage in a brief timeframe, unlike any technology we’ve ever seen before. Text generation models are capable of incredibly advanced behavior. Models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are able to generate clear and coherent text, reason about complex problems, and even handle different types of content like images and videos. In fact, a recent study found that LLMs are nearly able to pass for humans in the Turing test, an experiment designed to see if machines can fool humans into thinking they’re human. ...

Do we have free will? That’s a question that’s haunted many philosophers, scientists, and people contemplating their existence late at night. We might find some answers in linear regression, of all the places. Background Linear regression can be simplified to drawing a line of best fit. Given any scattered set of data points, we want to create a line that best represents the shape of the data. A simple, 2D linear regression model is given by a general form ...

From the moment we are born, there are expectations placed on us: go to school, find a job, start a family, build a life. Society gives us a blueprint on how to live a “meaningful” life. However, existentialism fundamentally rejects the premise that we have some “predetermined” purpose; instead, it suggests that it is up to an individual to find purpose in their life. Existentialists become aware of the “absurdity” of human existence: the fact that life itself lacks any inherent meaning beyond what we choose to give it. This problem, where humans seek purpose in a universe that offers none, leads to a dilemma: should we accept the illusion of meaning from society, or should we create our own? ...

We’ve seen the rise of many great empires and nations–Romans and their expansive empire, the British and their global dominance–only to see it crumble to dust. We can blame a lot of things on these collapses: new rising nations, changing technology, unexpected external factors. However, the collapse typically comes from within, as the relationship between the government and its citizens starts to crack and fail. This dramatic decay can be explained by a concept called the social contract. The social contract is one of the most important ideas in political philosophy (the study of the nature of politics, society, and the relationship between citizens and government). It states that citizens willingly consent to give up some personal freedoms to a governing authority, in exchange for the protection of their rights. To put it really simply, citizens give up some free will to gain protection from the government. The social contract was essential to the founding of the United States, but the digital age is bringing new changes to this centuries-old concept. ...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana The present can seem like a very unstable and turbulent time. It seems as if the world is splitting itself apart, becoming more polarized and opinionated. However, to understand the direction the world is headed, we need to look back in the past for answers. Now, Hegel is notorious for being incredibly difficult to read. His works are often long-winded and use poor english to convey his thoughts. However, his ideas are incredibly important to understand. However, one of his ideas is incredibly important to understand: the dialectic. When broken down, the dialectic is not a very complicated idea. ...