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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XV. Updating the “us” within a technological context
Illustration by DALL·E
Updating the “us” within a technological context
In the same way as Linnæus positioned us among the anthropoid apes, now the existence of intelligent machines sets us in a family of intelligent beings where living creatures and machines…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XII. AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial
Illustration by DALL·E
AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial
This does not mean however that scientific research had become an easy pursuit in the West from the 16th century onwards: the image of the tree of knowledge’s forbidden fruit maintained…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XI. Why were we caught off-guard by AI?
A portrait of Tycho Brahe, Royal Astrologist of Danemark, by Stable Diffusion
Why were we caught off-guard by AI?
Despite artificial intelligence having been a field of research since…
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Video – Gödel’s legerdemain. The demonstration of his incompleteness of arithmetic theorem betrays his contempt for his fellow mathematicians
My contribution to the XXV World Congress of Philosophy this summer.
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Rethinking problem solving: a roadmap, by Claude 3, GPT-4 and Paul Jorion
Illustration by DALL·E (+PJ)
After submitting to GPT-4 the questions we had debated, Claude 3, split into “Claude 1” and “Claude 2”, and I, I thought it would be a good idea for me to let them know their colleague’s assessment to see…
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P vs NP: I’ve hired two new staff!
Illustration by DALL·E (+PJ)
I’ve already had the occasion to explain that Yu Li, a lecturer at the Université de Picardie, approached me a few years back, asking me to give her a hand in solving the P vs NP conjecture (her attention…
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Where this blog stands
Various commitments on papers commissioned in French have kept me away from this blog. Reward is another factor: with an average of around 30 daily hits on the English blog and 2500 on the French one, vanity has been a powerful drive for concentrating on the French one. Dialogue is another one. If you’ve had…
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Would an interruption of the Gulf Stream be reversible? And if so, at what cost?
I’m blessed with a very popular blog in French. One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.
This is a serious…
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The cunning of Reason
The very justification of a Human Complex System’s approach to the operation of human societies, implying a continuous explanatory spectrum from the individual (particle) to the cultural or societal levels (field), is offered by Hegel when he writes in Reason in History (*) that
… human actions in history produce additional results, beyond their…
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Logic and semantics in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace”
We read in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace” (*) that:
“Professor Leon Speciman postulates a civilization in outer space that is more advanced than ours by approximately fifteen minutes. This, he feels gives them a great advantage over us, since they needn’t rush to get to appointments.”
With due respect to the Nobel…
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Why, like cats, we have nine lives
Back in 2000 I devoted a paper to some implications of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III in his Princeton thesis entitled “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”. At the time I had no notion of anybody else in philosophy interested in these issues. The article was…