5:56: Aaron
Sloman, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (note that at the time of
writing it has a link to download the book). Here's an interesting anecdote Bill
shared: “As I mentioned, I was greatly influenced by his book. A few years ago,
he emailed me asking permission to link to one of my webpages, so I had a chance
to thank him for his influence. We started a very nice conversation online and
via Zoom, and he helped publicize my book.”
17:25:
People may be confused here because I just said that this is the first course
I'm taking and it doesn't have the problem. There are other ways to experience a
course without taking it (for credit).
23:01: Bill
discusses slow reading in his book, in Section 8.2, and also online as part of
his “How to Study” webpage here.
21:19: What
I meant was close to this, so a
focus on specific outcomes, regular assessment, predefined curriculum and
content, etc.
29:12: Both quotes
are from Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6. The first is from Section 3, line 1139b.20.
The second is from Section 4, line 1140a.10. I’m using the translation of
Hippocrates G. Apostle because I think it’s the most accurate, but he uses the
translated terms “knowledge” and “art” for “ἐπιστήμη”
and “τέχνη”, respectively, whereas I used the
original ones. I should clarify that in Modern Greek “τέχνη” means “art” or
“craft”, but “ἐπιστήμη” means “science” in the
contemporary sense, i.e., experimental science where induction and
abduction are the main methods of inference. This was not the case for
Aristotle. He was talking about demonstrative knowledge, i.e., deductive
knowledge (although some of the first principles, i.e., the axioms, were found
by observation and induction).
32:13: This topic is discussed extensively in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of the book.
41:43: This
is a notoriously difficult subject, but if you want a good summary that doesn’t
simplify the subject too much, I personally like this answer.
42:07: Bill
was thinking of Arrival, and according
to him, “equally important is the story it was based on.”
43:21: See Section 3.6.1 in the book, pages 54-55, and 2.4.2 in the AI Debate paper.
47:30: Even
though the specific benchmark is irrelevant to the argument, the benchmark I
mentioned is the the SPEC
Benchmark, which is the standard benchmark in compiler and computer
architecture research.
47:48: Actually my point is that the algorithm is not random at all, in the sense that it can be very precise, intentional (in the non-philosophical sense), and we can clearly understand it. The fact that it can be very simple helps in the latter. What you may want to think here is the following: The training algorithm is not something which generates random programs (i.e., the space of programs that it may generate is much smaller than the programs (the “compilers”) that my program may generate). That must give me some more information about the result.
51:23: This “one hand”—the first point—comes mainly from page 29 in the AI Debate paper.
51:35: I’m referring to Turing’s quote, again on page 29, and the discussion that follows it.
52:33: Indicatively, this is in the Abstract and 2.4.1.
1:10:37:
I’m talking about Hilbert’s optimism which was arguably shuttered by Gödel’s
Incompleteness Theorems. Charles Petzold in “The Annotated Turing” tells the story fantastically.
1:18:10: The article I’m referring to is called “The Internet Can Still Be Good”, which appeared in the April 2025 issue of The Atlantic magazine.
1:19:10: For the longest time, if you searched my advisor’s name “Charith Mendis”, it showed a summary of a cricketer’s biography with the same name, but with my advisor’s picture (probably because Wikipedia doesn’t have a picture for the cricketer).
1:21:10: I’m referring to Section 2 and pages 9 and 10 in the book.
1:21:39: This is from Section 8.2 in the LLM paper.
1:51:23: Noûs (νοῦς).
Church published at least 2 papers in this journal, “Outline of a Revised
Formulation of the Logic of Sense and Denotation” parts I and II, but I could
not find a single tilde in them :/ But Bill sent us Church’s
handwritten letter to Hector-Neri Castañeda, the editor of Noûs
(and Bill's dissertation advisor). In it, he's explaining his tilde issue. You can
find it here.
1:53:52: Just to be sure, what I said here was “John Rawls’ veil of ignorance”.
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