A Discussion with William J. Rapaport


Apr 02, 2025

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Notes & References

I would like to express my gratitude to Bill for helping me create this list.

  • 0:48: Some links to the research groups with which Bill is involved: The SNePS Research Group, Deixis, and Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition.
  • 1:10: Philosophy of Computer Science: An Introduction to the Issues and the Literature.
  • 1:55:
  • 3:00: Selmer Bringsjord.
  • 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.”
  • 7:04: Stuart C. Shapiro.
  • 9:07: M.S. Thesis.
  • 10:18: See Deixis.
  • 11:50: The paper he’s referring to: Philosophy of Computer Science: An Introductory Course.
  • 15:56: Daniel D. Kang and Charith Mendis.
  • 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.
  • 24:52: Online Resources, and the Instructor’s Manual.
  • 26:58: Here's a related article by Bill: A Triage Theory of Grading: The Good, the Bad, and the Middling.
  • 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.
  • 37:50: I’m talking about Section 2.4.1.
  • 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.
  • 44:04: Joseph Sifakis. This statement was made by Sifakis in Greek, in this podcast. I translated it to English.
  • 46:15: Noam Chomsky’s opinion essay in NYTimes: The False Promise of ChatGPT.
  • 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.
  • 1:08:12: Alexius Meinong.
  • 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.
  • 1:13:20: Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. Their argument is summarized and discussed in Section 4.3 of the AI Debate paper. There's also a separate paper-response by Bill in Cosmos+Taxis here.
  • 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.
  • 1:27:13: Here’s an interview of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on this project: Philosophy Bites: Walter-Sinnott Armstrong on AI and Morality.
  • 1:29:54: Bill cites a discussion with Lance Fortnow in Section 4.3 of the LLM paper. You can also take a look at this short blogpost by Lance Fortnow.
  • 1:33:26: ELIZA. You can actually try it online here.
  • 1:43:19: Bill was referring to The Feeling of Power, which is available online here.
  • 1:45:13: Indeed! https://cse.buffalo.edu/restaurant.guide/
  • 1:47:21: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.
  • 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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