Dragging files around in a GUI is a familiar action that does known things with known consequences. Somewhere on the hard disc (or SSD, or somewhere in the cloud, etc.) there is indeed a "file" which has indeed been "moved" into a "folder", and taking off those quotation marks only requires some background knowledge (which in fact I have) of the lower-level things that are going on and which the GUI presents to me through this visual metaphor.
Some explanations work better than others. The idea that there is stuff out there that gives rise to my perceptions, and which I can act on with predictable results, seems to me the obvious explanation that any other contender will have to do a great deal of work to topple from the plinth. The various philosophical arguments over doctrines such as "idealism", "realism", and so on are more like a musical recreation (see my other comment) than anything to take seriously as a search for truth. They are hardly the sort of thing that can be right or wrong, and to the extent that they are, they are all wrong.
Ok, that's my personal view of a lot of philosophy, but I'm not the only one.
A lot of philosophy is like that. Or perhaps it is better compared to music. Music sounds meaningful, but no-one has explained what it means. Even so, much philosophy sounds meaningful, consisting of grammatical sentences with a sense of coherence, but actually meaning nothing. This is why there is no progress in philosophy, any more than there is in music. New forms can be invented and other forms can go out of fashion, but the only development is the ever-greater sprawl of the forest.
In (3), the word “merely” is doing a lot of unexamined work. My perceptions have a coherence to them, an obstinate coherence that I cannot wish away. I reach out for the coffee cup that I see, and it shows up to my sense of touch. What does it mean to call this a “mere” response, when it maintains a persistent similarity of structure to my idea of what is out there—that is, it is a representation of it.
In (4), if the hypothesis explains the perceptions, the perceptions are evidence for the hypothesis. These are two different ways of saying the same thing.
Continuous does not imply non-zero either. There is no reason to rule out consciousness being present in humans and not at all — not merely negligibly present, but absolutely not present — in a single atom, or an entire insect.
But does the probability decrease fast enough?
"AI Watch."
AI Corporation Watch | AI Mega-Corp Watch | AI Company Watch | AI Industry Watch | AI Firm Watch | AI Behemoth Watch | AI Colossus Watch | AI Juggernaut Watch | AI Future Watch
These are either tendentious ("Juggernaut") or unnecessarily specific to the present moment ("Mega-Corp").
How about simply "AI Watch"?
I can only agree , since I've been saying for a long time that the current rationalist movement is only the latest iteration of many.
I'd agree with that, except for the word "only". It is no criticism of the present, to observe that it has a history.
Is it possible that ethics-motivated laws will strange generative AI
"Strangle"?
Some philosophy is rubbish. Quite a lot, I believe. And with a statement such as "perceptions are representations of things external to the perceptions themselves", which I find unremarkable in itself as a prima facie obvious hypothesis to run with, there is a tendency for philosophers to go off the rails immediately by inventing precise definitions of words such as "perceptions", "are", and "representations", and elaborating all manner of quibbles and paradoxes. Hence the whole tedious catalogue of realisms.
Science did not get anywhere by speculating on whether there are four or five elements and arguing about their natures.