Infinite Value and the Best of All Possible Worlds

Climenhaga, Nevin

doi:10.1111/phpr.12383

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…That said, it is plainly the case that caution is in order when applying inferences that are valid in finite cases to infinite cases. For cautionary notes along these lines especially useful to those who affirm the consequent of our key conditional, see Hamkins and Montero (1999) and Climenhaga (2018); see also Rubio (2020)'s reply to Climenhaga.…”

Section: Consequence and Extensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Valuable Could a Person Be?*

Bailey

Rasmussen

2020

Philos Phenomenol Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Our topic is the value of human persons. While we do not have a reductive definition or analysis of the concepts involved, we lay out a few clarifying assumptions.First, we are thinking of value as the most general positive status. Thus, any thing that is good in any sense at all falls under this capacious umbrella. Value at this most abstract level includes, we might say, the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is common to and unites all and only things that are morally positive, epistemically positive, or aesthetically positive.Second, value comes in degrees; some things are more valuable than others. Some things, furthermore, suffer from negative degrees of value or disvalue; it is better for them not to be. A helpful connection may be this: Anselmian perfection or supreme value is the upper limit case of value in the target sense. To be perfect in St. Anselm's sense is for it to be good to the highest (conceivable) degree that one exist.Third, all kinds of things can be valuable: displays of courage, sublime waterfalls, true beliefs, properly-functioning dehumidifiers, delicious durians, elegant theories, and so on. And all sorts of things can be disvaluable: pain, unrequited love, murder, damage to soft myofascial tissue, and so on. It does not follow, of course, that all of these things have the same kind of value. Despite all being good in some respect or other, some might be categorically different from others in the value they possess.

show abstract

Section: Consequence and Extensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Valuable Could a Person Be?*

Bailey

Rasmussen

2020

Philos Phenomenol Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Far from discussing here the adventures of Chevalier De Mere, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat that kick-started the study of probability, transforming it into a sound mathematical theory, disagreements on how to reason about the likelihood of a given event are conducted among human beings every day. These are disagreements that our cognitive biases often exacerbate, especially when we humans ignore evidence that runs counter to the specific hypotheses we favor (Climehaga, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

On the probabilistic mind of a robot

Roccetti

Casini

Delnevo

2020

FRL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we discuss what differentiates an artificial mind from a human one, during the process of making a choice. We do this without any intention to debunk famous arguments according to which there are aspects of human consciousness and expertise that cannot be simulated by artificial humanlike cognitive entities (like a robot, for example). We will first put in evidence that artificial minds, built on top of Deep Neural Network (DNN) technologies, are probabilistic in nature, and follow a very clear line of reasoning. Simply told, their reasoning style can be assimilated to a process that starts from a bunch of example data and learns to point to the most likely output, where the meaning of likely, here, is neither vague or fuzzy, but it obeys well-known probability theories. Nonetheless, as such, choices could be made by those intelligent entities that fail to pass human plausibility criteria, even if those chosen are those with high probability values. We will provide an (obvious) explanation for this apparent paradox, and we will demonstrate that an artificial mind based on a DNN can be driven to translate probabilities into choices that humans judge as plausible. Finally, we will show how an artificial probabilistic mind can be made to learn from its errors, till the point where it exhibits a cognitive behavior comparable to that of a human being.

show abstract

“… Rubio's targets areKraay (2010b) andClimenhaga (2018). Rubio does not claim to have shown that there is no best world; only that certain arguments to the contrary fail.41 Of course, a move like this must be well-motivated, not ad hoc.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Axiology of Theism

Kraay

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Theism is the view that God exists; naturalism is the view that there are no supernatural beings, processes, mechanisms, or forces. This Element explores whether things are better, worse, or neither on theism relative to naturalism. It introduces readers to the central philosophical issues that bear on this question, and it distinguishes a wide range of ways it can be answered. It critically examines four views, three of which hold (in various ways) that things are better on theism than on naturalism, and one of which holds just the opposite.

show abstract

Infinite Value and the Best of All Possible Worlds

Cited by 9 publications

References 33 publications

How Valuable Could a Person Be?*

How Valuable Could a Person Be?*

On the probabilistic mind of a robot

The Axiology of Theism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About