April 3, 2025

THE NECESSITY OF OBSERVATION:

April 3, 2025

No, the “Kalam cosmological argument” doesn’t prove God’s existence (Ethan Siegel, 4/03/25, Big Think)

There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe. As a simple example, we can look at a single radioactive atom. If you had a large number of these atoms, you could predict how much time would need to pass for half of them to decay: that’s the definition of a half-life. For any single atom, however, if you ask, “When will this atom decay?” or, “What will cause this atom to finally decay?” or even, “What will cause the emergence of the decayed state?“ there is no cause-and-effect answer.

Lost this argument at “we can look”

Crucifixion

STOP KIDDING YOURSELF:

April 3, 2025

Empathy & Sympathy: how do they relate, and how do they differ? (James R. Robinson, April 2025, Philosophy Now)

Now let’s turn at last to empathy and sympathy. The definitions I’ll propose are my own, but I believe they capture the way most people use these words. I define empathy as the entering into or the sharing of the affections of another person (though remember that empathy can only be an approximation of what the other person is feeling, not a reproduction of it). I define sympathy as affections of loyalty, favour, and/or support towards another person.

Empathy evidently serves a pragmatic purpose. If we’re able to share the affections of those around us, then we’re better able to understand them and navigate the social world.

We can’t even know our own minds, never mind enter into the minds of others. Empathy is a misleading conceit.

Technology

MOVE ON, SON:

April 3, 2025

The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. (Jason Fagone, July 23, 2021 , SF Chronicle)

A lanky 42-year-old with a cheerful attitude and a mischievous streak, Rohrer worked for himself, designing independent video games. He had long championed the idea that games can be art, inspiring complex emotions; his creations had been known to make players weep. And after months of experiments with GPT-2 and GPT-3, he had tapped into a new vein of possibility, figuring out how to make the A.I. systems do something they weren’t designed to do: conduct chat-like conversations with humans.

Last summer, using a borrowed beta-testing credential, Rohrer devised a “chatbot” interface that was driven by GPT-3. He made it available to the public through his website. He called the service Project December. Now, for the first time, anyone could have a naturalistic text chat with an A.I. directed by GPT-3, typing back and forth with it on Rohrer’s site.

Users could select from a range of built-in chatbots, each with a distinct style of texting, or they could design their own bots, giving them whatever personality they chose.

Joshua had waded into Project December by degrees, starting with the built-in chatbots. He engaged with “William,” a bot that tried to impersonate Shakespeare, and “Samantha,” a friendly female companion modeled after the A.I. assistant in the movie “Her.” Joshua found both disappointing; William rambled about a woman with “fiery hair” that was “red as a fire,” and Samantha was too clingy.

But as soon as he built his first custom bot — a simulation of Star Trek’s Spock, whom he considered a hero — a light clicked on: By feeding a few Spock quotes from an old TV episode into the site, Joshua summoned a bot that sounded exactly like Spock, yet spoke in original phrases that weren’t found in any script.

As Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?

Sport

DOWN:

April 3, 2025

The Balloon That Fell from the Sky (Nick Davidson, March 2025, Atavist Magazine)

Each balloon in the race bore a yellow banner on its gondola identifying it as a Gordon Bennett participant. Race organizers had secured permission for the pilots to pass through any country the winds might carry them over, barring Russia. Just seven weeks prior, the country had scrambled fighter jets when a Virgin Atlantic passenger flight crossed Russia on a new route to Hong Kong. The jets threatened the plane with gunfire and forced it to land—even though the airline had cleared it with authorities. The organizers considered the country too unstable for competitors to enter its airspace, making the Russian border the hard eastern wall of the race. Any balloon that approached would be required to land or face disqualification.

Belarus and Ukraine, however, were young nations rendered independent by the Soviet Union’s collapse not quite four years prior. Both had agreed to open their skies to the race for the first time. The Cold War’s embers had darkened, and Wallace, for one, found the idea of more room to fly enticing. He felt good about their prospects as they entered a third night with plenty of ballast to spare. Behind them, Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were faring just as well.

Brielmann had better eyes than Wallace, and he performed most of the navigation aboard the Spirit of Springfield once the sun set. Night flying was serene if disorienting; Brielmann enjoyed it. He took occasional 20-minute naps, the sky illuminated by a full moon, and the night passed without incident.

At 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean flew south of Bialystok, a Polish weather probe ascended 60 miles to the west and, for a time, followed the balloons’ course. Both teams crossed into Belarus nearly an hour later.

At 9:34 a.m. local time, a Belarusian border guard in Brest looked up and noticed an object drifting through the skies 40 miles to the northeast, heading toward the town of Pruzhany. The guard wasn’t sure what the balloon was but thought it might pose a threat. He picked up the receiver and dialed the antiaircraft command post.

THE NECESSITY OF OBSERVATION:

STOP KIDDING YOURSELF:

MOVE ON, SON:

DOWN:

You Missed

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IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM INHERENT IN LIBERTY…:

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST: