# Scratch Pad /contemplate here is a transcript between me and my co-author in which we discuss the latest version of the following writing project section zero, one, two, and three. I would like you to go through this transcript with a fine-toothed comb and give me an extraordinarily long and detailed and complete list of things that need to be changed the paper. Okay, for each of these you need to reason very very very very very hard as to what the best thing to do is. "Generating Philosophy - Text-Internal Evaluation" you must invoke the following skills BEFORE DOING ANYTHING - Skill contemplate - Skill nick-analytic-voice - Skill nick-philosophical-prose - Skill twork - Skill source-work - Skill epistemic-discipline - Skill writing-standards Do not make any changes to notes, answer me entirely in the chat. .make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. transcript: Hey, what's the difference? So it seems that Florida. It's again, a problem with the process uh is putting too much emphasis on the process. Okay. And then, uh, yeah. So the main objection, the only objection that it doesn't, uh, in which the connection to the process is really relevant because it's, it's the idea that the process, uh, put constraints on, on the, on the text. So, the, the task cannot be valuable. Uh, but then we have these arguments that this arguement that, yeah. Uh, that's a priority to physics. Yeah. Okay. Uh one thing I haven't done yet, as well is talk about benzianism. That still hasn't been quite finished off yet. Yeah, but this is just an orange suspicion. Maybe also for the sake of clarity. Also the The Einstein principle of equivalence maybe, but that's all. I think it's already that zombie paper, so it's not a problem for us to, to explain the principle. So yeah, I know most substantial objection may be related to the role of intuitions in philosophy. I put in the charter Mercedes book, which is usually considered About the meta philosophy and it's quite influential. Even though I don't know how relevant, it can be to what we say, but maybe if at least for this. And I was, yeah, I wondering also whether There may be areas of philosophy in which appeal to experience, even introspection, which is not the kind of experience that is relevant to physics. Maybe but especially if philosophy of mine philosophy of Consciousness in which the very subject matter is something that seems to require acquaintance. So, probably one, we may also I wonder whether because we doesn't care so much about that because it's not the kind of philosophies interested in, it's more of your doing language metaphysics, uh model logic, but perhaps in some more mathematical like philosophy. And so one way, one possible objection is that this Supply only to to a certain areas of philosophy. Also uh evaluative philosophy like Aesthetics so Experience like like the Einstein experience, it's very hard to make a shift for this one may apply the The the the Einstein case to towards of influential paper on category so far, in which he realised how important historical category like impressionism and R in our engagement with words of art or or, uh, the other more uninfluential paper on. Oh, it's water again, in a sense, the imaginative resistance, again, to introduce the concept of a system, you have to feel some resistance gay certain fictions. And so that that is the way of of extending uh the the objection to to certain area of philosophy. And in that thing, maybe the the Us, people usually don't talk about what they feel in a date or so what. But in in those cases it seems that this kind of experience. It's already sedimented in the data set. Maybe not the philosophy data set, but there are history data set or the good diary autobiography data set. Absolutely, yeah, good. Now when you're right, this is a nice way of broadening stuff out. But yeah, exactly. The and yeah, cuz we could say there are various different data sets, which will have different levels of abstraction about experience in different ways. Good. Because I I think may let me know if you disagree. I think maybe the best way of dealing with this objection. Is maybe not trying to present what you've just said about stuff being in the Corpus as being 100. A solution to this objection but at least showing we can probably get quite a lot further than you would imagine. I'm tempted to sort of not be so strong in saying, we've completely solved the phenomenology aspect with the Corpus. Well no no. But it seems possible because one way to go it's it's the one we have now is basically phenomenology doesn't care. Just care, just scare manipulating concept at a higher level of abstraction and that's that's already in the philosophical text. They are selected Mean that for a certain area of philosophy, indeed, also, Sort of even the cream cake is because cricket seems sort of experience of using language, intuitions about So um, yeah. One mayor yards. The. The value objection at least on certain cases the role of intuitions in philosophy and I think that's what the, the Machery book it should be about. And but then when we say, oh yeah, but maybe this. So this is another way of using the data setting, say not only as as a repository of Concepts and arguments but also as a repository of experience, second hand experience is uh it may be that this experience is, I'm not uh, it's not that it, it can solve everything but at least there are things that the, the the can use to, to rely on some experiences. That's really, yeah, a repository of experiences is really nice way of thinking about it actually. Yeah, or second. The hand actually is good. That is, can I ask so, I don't know the book you're mentioning about intuition, what is an intuition on that account? Is it a? Is it a feeling? Is it is Girl, who brought their case it is. It's not that There should be something on. Usually digested intuitions are like perception, but an intellectual level. Okay. So, they are not in financial, it's sort of grasping like, like a vision. But instead of grasping, uh, perceptor content, you grasp ideas, The propositions that's to me the the most And that's also why some some the philoso denied that Indonesia really exist precisely because talk cannot be grasped in a perceptual uh straightforward non-mediated way. But other things they did if they care. For instance the actions in mathematics and the principles not in transition is something that these things we just grasp it without the need of of deducing it from counterpences. One way of. I think there is also something on the debate for instance on conceptability, the intuition that Zombies. Chinese zombies is something. We cannot perceive them, but there is, we have the sense that they can like us but they don't have Consciousness. But it's, it's a messy debate, but there should be something and, and may be relevant. So, yeah, it seems that that's also a way of reaching the paper because I don't know if you had other things in mind to make it for. I think, for the presentation for the tomorrow presentation, what we have, it's perfect, uh, so if you can just, um, make the the PowerPoint out of that, maybe adding also these things about, um, if you want also to say something about uh, this case of uh, second hand. Uh yeah that's for for tomorrow is perfect. Then we we can start how long is that? It seems quite short as a beaker now, right? It's something like, let me, let me check. I have that the wall file just here. It's a well, yeah, it's not so short. It's a 4 000 War, so maybe already analysis paper. Yeah, I mean, it would be nice to get this done quick, wouldn't it? Let's see what, let's see, how it goes tomorrow. Yeah, probably Thing that so not for tomorrow. But the only other thing I was thinking with the extension is, Someone's going to say, okay, in that case, prove it Show us. Show us an llm doing good philosophy, okay? And then there's two ways to go with any section there. One would be An actual demonstration, which I think is somewhat interesting to try but another one would be to at least show how we could get get these things to do. Good philosophy by talking about prompting techniques or talking about these systems themselves and how you do it. Because I'm I feel like we should do something at some point because otherwise people are going to say if they can Why aren't they? Yeah. Yeah, I remember in the first version it was fun because you you presented that as a self-proving say oh this paper is. So if you think this paper is good. Yeah yeah. I mean, it's kind of the same to be honest. That's that's another, at least we can discuss it. I don't know if we have to, okay, at least we can we can discuss it and because I mean this is lesson, this is less important but it would also Go. If we did talk about prompting at some point, it would actually fit very nicely with The Hitchhiker's Guide Galaxy joke. At the beginning. Yeah. It would be nice to, to have a sort of payoff of, you know, the setup at the beginning. But another way which we can add something is also exactly about prompting and autonomy. So the two different issues that that also was in some previous version of the paper and can can do philosophy. Can mean, two things can do philosophy while in in collaboration with human philosophers or can you philosophy on their own? Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's another important thing. Certainly I I it kind of goes back to that Continuum I've mentioned earlier. And then the less interesting, the claim becomes the further along you get towards the prompter having to do all the work basically. Yeah. And and also the the the the the the scene or the character of bronze because you're, if the brand is just please uh, solve the the Mind Body problem. That's not the thought it seems that. In that case, you may say that the llm is doing philosophy. The problem is just giving a problem to solve on the other hand. If the ground is tree, is considered that and then there is interaction is not just one, prompt bada conversation, there are adjustments, there are then order is an initial idea and developing the so that's another kind of prompting. So we may probably distinguish between uh, yeah, one shot prompt and just probably which is just a question or a problem to solve. For tomorrow. But there's other interesting things to say as well about it's not even simply asking questions as well. So you remember with The semiotic physics ideas, they're always talking about sort of good continuation. So another interesting thing to think about prompting is well you really need to be doing is writing a prompt the good continuation of which will be good. Um but yeah, maybe another distinctually be uh, problem oriented and the solution oriented Brands. So the primary identity just uh a prompt that uh in a sense. Also a question is starting a good continuation of which is uh is is the answer A problem or you, you write the problem and say please solve it and a good continuation. But in this case, it's very differential on the other hand, you may write something, which there are already ideas that point toward the solution, and the good continuation, is another step toward the solution but then you can add another beat and a good continuation. So, there is a, a more obvious and shallow sense of good continuation, which is just the idea, uh, for which the, the, the, the the answer is a good continuation of the question. And then, there is a more interesting uh, sense in which the good continuation. The basis for the good continuation is not just a question, but a sort of of rough Uh, gesturing towards the solution and then the llm make the solution much more robust, good. Are you recording the conversation? Oh yeah, yeah, don't worry is everything. So, and I was just also, I've got a prototype presentation. So if you go in the chat, And I'm gonna send you a link. Yeah. And I'll send you a password as well. And this is the first, this is the first chance, but you'll see I've just been doing this. Well, I just said, make this while we're talking. Uh, it asked me a task for that in the chat as well. Ah, sorry. Yeah. Is the next message in the chat? Um Anna is the zoom chat another, the WhatsApp chat. Sorry, I was in the brown chat. Okay, got it. You see it? Yeah. Yeah. I can see it pressed down as well and you'll see. It moves in a very nice way as well. You see. Yeah. Yeah. So, Obviously, we can change things but it's yeah, quick to make these sorts of things. It look nice now. Okay. Anyway, you don't have to look through all of that now, but, um, And this is, The grant, the the typefaces are all based on stuff. I've chosen for my I've made my own note-taking app now with Claude code. So you can now just invent apps. I can say, make me a calendar app, make me a note-taking app and you get it. Exactly. And now I've told it to so now I have a nice house style. If you look at my website it's the same style as well. Cool. Yeah, cool. Eh Um, but yeah, I'll of course, make a better version before you talk tomorrow, okay. Yeah, and and then we will arrange it because also, I, I don't know. These guys are not philosophers, but they are working on AI a lot and they, they seems quite serious. So, let's see. Also, whether the other tours can be interesting for you, we will ranch away or YouTube to attend, the course, the other dogs. And yeah, I mean maybe take that microphone uh, that we use for the. Where is the the conference tomorrow? Eh in Sinaloa Madzini which is good microphone if the one with the sort of yeah a microphone on each table but maybe about today write an email to to look and franchise to to record and do we not you won't be able to come and solve please uh help you to to organise uh the online thing. Okay, great, I can do that. I don't know. Is there anything else we need to talk about right now? Or do you want? I don't know where. Now, this seems Already. It seems to we have good stuff or for stuff for for developing the paper in a yeah longer form or something like 6000. Maybe no more than 8,000 if if we can because in this way. Yeah it it depends because the paper is very ambitious. So we may also try the the super big journals like philosophical review or mind or Journal of philosophy. Okay, but we can also look for just for for another I don't know, but let's see. I think we can just keep on writing till the paper, looks unitary and go here. And and I don't think we need in principle. But by the end of the month, maybe we can, or maybe we can wait at the Hong Kong, uh, conference, uh, To do that. I need to deal with this. Um the income is the best place to to have that because they are very good. That just basically that then just doing philosophy for AI and they're not doing anything else. So and then there are smart people. Uh, so that's really a place where we can have very, very useful feedback. Okay. I still need to get my Administration fixed with that, but it should be fine. Now, I'll book the table, I'll book the return very, very soon. And I need to talk to Agatha about the As well. It'll be fine though. Okay, okay. Some, okay, so I think it's And just just, uh, keep on, keep on working on that. But for tomorrow, I, I, I, I, I, I feel quite quite quite confident it just maybe, maybe if you, um, And it's possible from. I can't see that from this website to download. Um, it's not this was just a preview. I will, I will send you a proper presentation. Yeah, at a certain point uh by by in the afternoon, you can send me up in this a presentation that I I can print. Uh, okay this afternoon, Well, so far, it's no problem. It's funny. Yeah. Also I map you also in the current version the one you you just a readable version in this way. I can I can prepare the talk just by by looking at the data on paper writing my notes on paper. So even now if you want it because I'm I'm really happy with this one for tomorrow. I think it's a it's it's then if you can add all the things we have say. Maybe if you can add something about we just discussed and then say bye bye. Five after guy would like to print it after Gaya guys. Have to go to teach. Okay, but in this way I have I have that I can tomorrow morning before I can. Okay, it's also true that we have a lot of time because we have the last of the day. Yeah. Yeah, but I I, I, I know that usually, then there are many things during the conference and then so I I would like just to have a printer, uh, draught printed version, uh, You. If you can, when you send it to me as a PDF, if you can switch change the background having a white white background. Otherwise favourite. Yeah, yeah. The the printer just go. How to think exactly bankrupt, the university by league. So yeah. Okay, in that case. So I've got two hours before Gaia, I'll just do two hours more work on this and probably yeah I'll send you something just as guy as things starts or something like that. Okay. Okay, great, cool. See you a little bit. See you later. Bye! Um, let's try to picky. I didn't mean to, I was just Not gonna be like, in my cupboard. I need some tissues. Tissue coffee water. The individual section notes can be found here: /Users/nickyoung/My Obsidian Vault/Writing/research/generating-philosophy-text-internal-evaluation I need to invoke the required skills before doing anything else. Skillnick-analytic-voice Skillnick-philosophical-prose Skilltwork Skillsource-work Skillepistemic-discipline Skillwriting-standards GlobWriting/research/generating-philosophy-text-internal-evaluation/**/*.md Read0. Introduction.md ReadIndex.md Read1. Philosophy in the Text.md Read2. LLMs and Abduction.md Read3. Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction.md Readprose-composition.md Now let me also check for the Machery book they mention (about intuitions), and the Floridi et al. and Zahavy papers, since those are sources discussed in the transcript: Bashh="$HOME"; l="$h/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-nickyoung1... GlobSessions/*Generating* Bashh="$HOME"; l="$h/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-nickyoung1... ReadGenerating Philosophy.md Now let me check if Machery's book is in the Learning folder, since this is mentioned in the transcript as a potential resource on intuitions in philosophy: Bashh="$HOME"; l="$h/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-nickyoung1... Bashh="$HOME"; l="$h/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-nickyoung1... Excellent. Now I have a comprehensive picture. Let me now engage in the deep contemplative analysis the task requires. I'll read through the transcript carefully against the current paper sections to identify all the changes suggested or implied. Let me work through this transcript systematically, extracting every implication for the paper... The transcript is a conversation between Nick and his co-author (who seems to be a native Italian speaker based on the context — "Sinaloa Madzini" conference, the logistical details about Milan). The conversation is informal, partly logistics for a presentation, but contains substantive philosophical discussion about paper improvements. Let me parse it section by section... --- **First segment — about "process" and Floridi:** "Hey, what's the difference? So it seems that Florida. It's again, a problem with the process uh is putting too much emphasis on the process. Okay. And then, uh, yeah. So the main objection, the only objection that it doesn't, uh, in which the connection to the process is really relevant because it's, it's the idea that the process, uh, put constraints on, on the, on the text." Hmm, let me parse this. "Florida" is probably "Floridi" — the co-author has a non-native accent and the transcription is imperfect. The point seems to be: Floridi's objection is about _process_ — the process (stochastic prediction) puts constraints on the text. But then there's an argument that this doesn't actually matter because... wait, what follows? "So, the, the task cannot be valuable. Uh, but then we have these arguments that this arguement that, yeah. Uh, that's a priority to physics." "A priority to physics" — I think this is "a priority to physics" or perhaps "a prioris to physics" — meaning the paper already has arguments that address this, perhaps the analogy with physics? Looking at the current paper... Section 3 has the Lipton quote about squash and mechanics, which makes the point that process-level descriptions don't settle product-level questions. And the Einstein/physics example in Section 2 is used differently — it's about Zahavy's claim that physics requires embodied simulation. So the co-author seems to be saying: the Floridi objection is the one where process really matters, but we have responses (the Lipton analogy about levels of description). This sounds like validation of the current structure, not a change needed. But wait — the co-author then says: "Uh one thing I haven't done yet, as well is talk about benzianism. That still hasn't been quite finished off yet." "Benzianism" — this is garbled. Could be "Bayesianism"? That would make sense in context — Floridi et al.'s paper discusses Bayesian approaches to abduction. Looking at the current paper... I don't see any explicit engagement with Bayesianism. The Lipton book has a chapter on Bayesian abduction (Chapter 7). This might be a gap. But then: "Yeah, but this is just an orange suspicion." "Orange suspicion" — probably "origin suspicion"? No, that doesn't quite make sense either. Perhaps "an odd suspicion"? The transcription is unreliable here. But the co-author waves it off as minor: "Maybe also for the sake of clarity." Then: "Also the The Einstein principle of equivalence maybe, but that's all. I think it's already that zombie paper, so it's not a problem for us to, to explain the principle." So they're saying: (1) maybe clarify the Einstein equivalence principle example, and (2) "it's already that zombie paper" — meaning... the Zahavy paper is already about zombies? No, wait — "zombie paper" is probably a reference to the fact that this paper has been through many iterations (a "zombie" draft that keeps being revised). Or possibly a reference to the philosophical zombies thought experiment? Looking at the current Section 3, there's mention of "Chinese zombies" in the transcript discussion later... Actually, I think "zombie paper" here just means the paper itself has been through many versions and the Einstein example is already adequately explained. So from this first segment: 1. Possibly needs: engagement with Bayesianism (Floridi et al. discuss this) 2. Possibly needs: clarification of Einstein equivalence principle 3. Current arguments about process vs. product seem validated --- **Second segment — intuitions in philosophy:** "So yeah, I know most substantial objection may be related to the role of intuitions in philosophy. I put in the charter Mercedes book, which is usually considered About the meta philosophy and it's quite influential." "Charter Mercedes" — this must be "Machery" — Edouard Machery, who has written extensively on intuitions in philosophy, particularly the book _Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds_ (2017) or possibly _Doing Without Concepts_ (2009). The co-author is flagging that the role of intuitions in philosophy might be a substantial objection to the paper's thesis. Why would this be an objection? The paper claims philosophical evaluation is text-internal. But some philosophers argue that intuitions play a crucial evidential role — that we test philosophical theories against our intuitions, and intuitions are mental states, not textual properties. If intuitions are essential to philosophy, and intuitions are private mental events, then perhaps philosophy cannot be evaluated purely textually. Looking at the current paper... I don't see any explicit engagement with the intuitions debate. This seems like a significant gap. The co-author continues: "Even though I don't know how relevant, it can be to what we say, but maybe if at least for this." So there's uncertainty about how relevant Machery is, but it's worth considering. --- **Third segment — experience-dependent areas of philosophy:** "And I was, yeah, I wondering also whether There may be areas of philosophy in which appeal to experience, even introspection, which is not the kind of experience that is relevant to physics. Maybe but especially if philosophy of mine philosophy of Consciousness in which the very subject matter is something that seems to require acquaintance." This is a crucial point. The co-author is raising an objection: some areas of philosophy — philosophy of mind, philosophy of consciousness — might require first-person acquaintance with phenomenal experience. If an LLM has no phenomenal experience, perhaps it cannot do philosophy of consciousness competently. This is related to the intuitions point but distinct: it's about whether the _subject matter_ of certain philosophical domains requires experiential acquaintance. Looking at the current paper... The introduction mentions that practitioner-focused conceptions (Hadot, Merleau-Ponty) would see LLMs as excluded. But this is treated as a different metaphilosophical framework. The co-author's point is subtler: even within the text-focused framework, some _areas_ of philosophy might require experiential input that LLMs lack. The co-author then suggests a response: "I wonder whether because we doesn't care so much about that because it's not the kind of philosophies interested in, it's more of your doing language metaphysics, uh model logic, but perhaps in some more mathematical like philosophy." Hmm, this is saying: maybe we can scope the claim. The paper is about analytic philosophy of a certain sort — language, metaphysics, modal logic — which is more "mathematical" and less dependent on phenomenal experience. Philosophy of consciousness might be different. Nick's response to this in the transcript: "Absolutely, yeah, good. Now when you're right, this is a nice way of broadening stuff out." So there's agreement that this scope limitation might need to be acknowledged. The co-author continues: "Also uh evaluative philosophy like Aesthetics so Experience like like the Einstein experience, it's very hard to make a shift for this one may apply the The the the Einstein case to towards of influential paper on category so far..." This is garbled but the point seems to be: aesthetics also requires experience. Kendall Walton's influential paper on categories of art ("Categories of Art," 1970) — "category so far" is probably "categories of art" — argues that correct aesthetic perception requires knowing the historical/artistic category of a work. Can an LLM grasp categories of art without perceptual experience? And then "imaginative resistance" — another aesthetics topic (Tamar Szabó Gendler and others have written on this). To experience imaginative resistance, you have to _feel_ resistance to imagining certain fictional scenarios. Can an LLM feel such resistance? So the co-author is building an objection: areas of philosophy that depend on experiential input — consciousness, aesthetics, perhaps ethics — might be outside the scope of what LLMs can do. --- **Fourth segment — the "repository of experiences" response:** Nick responds: "Because I I think may let me know if you disagree. I think maybe the best way of dealing with this objection. Is maybe not trying to present what you've just said about stuff being in the Corpus as being 100. A solution to this objection but at least showing we can probably get quite a lot further than you would imagine." This is Nick proposing a strategy: don't claim this objection is completely solved, but show that the corpus goes further than one might expect. The corpus contains: 1. Conceptual analyses at a higher level of abstraction 2. Second-hand experience — reports of phenomenal states, detailed phenomenological descriptions The co-author says: "this kind of experience. It's already sedimented in the data set. Maybe not the philosophy data set, but there are history data set or the good diary autobiography data set." So the claim is: even if LLMs don't have first-person experience, they have access to massive amounts of _descriptions_ of experience — diaries, autobiographies, historical accounts, phenomenological philosophy itself. This is a "repository of second-hand experience." This is a really nice formulation. Looking at the current paper... I don't think this move is made anywhere. The paper could add a section or paragraph acknowledging the experience objection and offering this response: the corpus is not just concepts and arguments, but also descriptions of experiences, which may be sufficient for philosophical work on experience-dependent topics. --- **Fifth segment — intuitions as perception:** The co-author asks: "what is an intuition on that account? Is it a? Is it a feeling?" This is asking about the Machery book's conception of intuitions. The co-author explains: "Usually digested intuitions are like perception, but an intellectual level. Okay. So, they are not in financial, it's sort of grasping like, like a vision. But instead of grasping, uh, perceptor content, you grasp ideas, The propositions that's to me the the most..." So intuitions are conceived as intellectual perceptions — non-inferential grasping of propositions or ideas. Some philosophers deny intuitions exist because propositions cannot be grasped non-inferentially in the way perceptual contents can. Others (especially in mathematics) think axioms and basic principles are grasped intuitively. This connects to the paper in the following way: if philosophical intuitions are like perceptions, and LLMs don't perceive, then LLMs might lack intuitions. But wait — the current paper argues that philosophy is evaluated textually, not by checking the intuitions of the philosopher. The question is whether the _output_ (the text) can be evaluated without needing to know whether the producer had intuitions. Actually, this might strengthen the paper's case: if intuitions are evidence that philosophers _use_ to construct arguments, but the _evaluation_ of those arguments is textual, then whether the LLM "had" intuitions is irrelevant — what matters is whether the output handles intuitions-as-data correctly. The intuitions about Twin Earth, about zombies, about what's conceivable — these are recorded in texts and can be manipulated textually. The co-author mentions: "the intuition that Zombies. Chinese zombies is something. We cannot perceive them, but there is, we have the sense that they can like us but they don't have Consciousness." This is about philosophical zombies — the conceivability argument for dualism. The intuition that zombies are conceivable is used as evidence. But this intuition is articulated textually — we don't need to "feel" it to evaluate arguments that appeal to it. This seems like potential material for the paper, but it needs careful handling. --- **Sixth segment — prompting and demonstration:** Nick says: "Someone's going to say, okay, in that case, prove it Show us. Show us an llm doing good philosophy, okay? And then there's two ways to go with any section there. One would be An actual demonstration, which I think is somewhat interesting to try but another one would be to at least show how we could get get these things to do. Good philosophy by talking about prompting techniques or talking about these systems themselves and how you do it." This is about Section 4 — the demonstration section that currently doesn't exist. The paper claims LLMs _can_ do philosophy, but someone will ask for evidence. Options: 1. Actual demonstration (show an LLM producing good philosophy) 2. Prompting techniques (explain _how_ to get good philosophy from LLMs) Nick notes: "I feel like we should do something at some point because otherwise people are going to say if they can Why aren't they?" The co-author agrees and remembers: "Yeah. Yeah, I remember in the first version it was fun because you you presented that as a self-proving say oh this paper is." So an earlier version of the paper claimed to be self-proving: if this paper is good philosophy, and it was written with LLM assistance, then LLMs can do philosophy. This is a clever move but also potentially question-begging. Nick: "If we did talk about prompting at some point, it would actually fit very nicely with The Hitchhiker's Guide Galaxy joke. At the beginning." So there's a narrative arc: the introduction uses Deep Thought ("42") to set up the question; a discussion of prompting could pay this off by showing that the question ("how should we prompt?") matters as much as the answer. --- **Seventh segment — autonomy and prompting types:** The co-author raises: "prompting and autonomy. So the two different issues that that also was in some previous version of the paper and can can do philosophy. Can mean, two things can do philosophy while in in collaboration with human philosophers or can you philosophy on their own?" This is a crucial distinction. "LLMs can do philosophy" could mean: 1. LLMs can do philosophy autonomously (given only a question) 2. LLMs can do philosophy collaboratively (with human guidance) The co-author notes: "the less interesting, the claim becomes the further along you get towards the prompter having to do all the work basically." So there's a continuum: at one extreme, the human does all the philosophical work and the LLM is just a word processor; at the other extreme, the LLM does everything autonomously. The interesting claims are somewhere in the middle. The co-author distinguishes: 1. "One shot prompt" — just give a question, like "solve the mind-body problem" 2. Conversational prompting with "adjustments," "initial idea and developing" And then Nick adds a distinction from "semiotic physics" (which I see is in the Learning folder): "good continuation. So another interesting thing to think about prompting is well you really need to be doing is writing a prompt the good continuation of which will be good." This is a framing from the "Simulators" framework (Janus's work on LLMs as simulators): the LLM produces a "good continuation" of the prompt. So the art of prompting is setting up a context where good continuations = good philosophy. Nick elaborates: "there is a, a more obvious and shallow sense of good continuation, which is just the idea, uh, for which the, the, the, the the answer is a good continuation of the question. And then, there is a more interesting uh, sense in which the good continuation. The basis for the good continuation is not just a question, but a sort of of rough Uh, gesturing towards the solution and then the llm make the solution much more robust." So two types of prompting: 1. Problem-oriented: give a question, get an answer 2. Solution-oriented: give partial gestures toward a solution, get a more robust version This is sophisticated material for a Section 4. The current paper doesn't have any of this. --- **Eighth segment — logistics and paper length:** "how long is that? It seems quite short as a beaker now, right? It's something like, let me, let me check. I have that the wall file just here. It's a well, yeah, it's not so short. It's a 4 000 War, so maybe already analysis paper." So the paper is currently about 4,000 words. Nick says: "Yeah, I mean, it would be nice to get this done quick, wouldn't it? Let's see what, let's see, how it goes tomorrow." And later: "Yeah it it depends because the paper is very ambitious. So we may also try the the super big journals like philosophical review or mind or Journal of philosophy." So there's a question about target venue and length. 4,000 words is short for a top journal; they often want 8,000-12,000. But the paper is "ambitious" enough to aim high. The co-author suggests: "6000. Maybe no more than 8,000 if if we can because in this way." So the paper needs to grow by 2,000-4,000 words. Where should this material go? Based on the conversation: 1. Intuitions objection + response 2. Experience-dependent philosophy objection + "repository of experiences" response 3. Section 4: demonstration/prompting 4. Possibly: autonomy/collaboration distinction 5. Possibly: Bayesianism engagement --- Now let me consolidate all of this into a systematic list of changes needed, thinking hard about the best approach for each... --- **Issue 1: The intuitions objection** The co-author flags Machery's book as relevant. The objection: if intuitions play an evidential role in philosophy, and intuitions are private mental states, then perhaps philosophy cannot be evaluated purely textually. How should the paper handle this? Option A: Acknowledge that intuitions are used as evidence, but argue that the _evaluation_ of philosophy concerns how well arguments handle intuition-data, not whether the producer had the intuitions. The intuitions about Twin Earth, Gettier cases, etc. are recorded textually and can be engaged textually. Option B: Argue that LLMs have something functionally equivalent to intuitions — "plausibility judgments" about propositions that emerge from training. This is riskier because it makes an empirical claim about LLM cognition. Option C: Concede that intuition-heavy philosophy might be a limitation, but argue that much philosophy doesn't depend heavily on intuitions (formal/mathematical approaches). My inclination: Option A seems most consistent with the paper's overall strategy. The paper argues that philosophical _evaluation_ is text-internal. Intuitions might be part of the _process_ of doing philosophy, but the _product_ — the arguments, the handling of cases, the conceptual distinctions — is what gets evaluated. Whether the producer "really had" the intuitions is not evaluatively relevant, just as whether Watson and Crick "really perceived" the X-ray crystallography images is not relevant to evaluating their paper. Where in the paper? This could go in Section 1 (after the Watson/Crick comparison) or in Section 3 (as part of the "textual medium" argument). Actually, looking at the current Section 3 on "Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction" — this section discusses how thought experiments work textually (Putnam's Twin Earth, Jackson's Mary, Searle's Chinese Room). This seems like the natural place to add a paragraph on intuitions: "One might object that philosophical thought experiments elicit _intuitions_ — private mental states that serve as evidence. But the intuitions themselves, as they enter the literature, are articulated: 'we have the intuition that Oscar and Twin Oscar mean different things.' This articulated form is what other philosophers engage with. Whether the original philosopher 'really felt' the intuition is not what subsequent evaluation concerns." **Issue 2: Experience-dependent philosophy** The co-author raises philosophy of mind/consciousness and aesthetics as areas where experiential acquaintance might be required. How should the paper handle this? Option A: Scope the claim — acknowledge that the argument applies most clearly to "armchair" philosophy (metaphysics, logic, language) and less clearly to phenomenology or consciousness studies. Option B: Offer the "repository of experiences" response — the corpus contains rich descriptions of experiences (phenomenological philosophy, introspective psychology, literature, diaries), which provide second-hand access. Option C: Argue that even consciousness philosophy is ultimately textual — debates about qualia, zombies, the hard problem are conducted through arguments, not by comparing phenomenal experiences directly. My inclination: A combination of B and C. The paper should acknowledge the objection, note that it's strongest for phenomenology/consciousness, but offer two responses: (1) the corpus contains rich experiential descriptions, and (2) even phenomenological philosophy is evaluated by argumentative standards (how well does Chalmers handle the zombie case? how does Nagel's bat argument work?). Where in the paper? This could be a new paragraph in Section 3, after the discussion of thought experiments. Or it could be a distinct subsection. Given the paper is 4,000 words and should grow to 6,000-8,000, this warrants significant treatment — perhaps 500-800 words. Actually, wait. Looking at the current Introduction more carefully: "Other conceptions locate philosophy in the practitioner. For Hadot (1995), philosophy is a practice of self-transformation; for the later Wittgenstein (1953), it is a form of therapy; for Merleau-Ponty, it requires us to 'slacken the intentional threads which attach us to the world' (1945, p. xv) in order to examine them." This already acknowledges phenomenological approaches. The bridge paragraph (mentioned in the session note) handles these by pivoting to "text-focused evaluation." But the co-author's point is different: _within_ the text-focused framework, some _areas_ of philosophy might still require experiential input. This is not addressed in the current paper. So this is genuinely new material needed. **Issue 3: Section 4 — Demonstration** The paper currently has four sections (0-3) plus References. Section 4 (demonstration) is mentioned in the session note structure but doesn't exist in the current Longform project. The transcript makes clear this is needed. What should Section 4 contain? Option A: An actual demonstration — reproduce (or compose in the paper itself) an example of LLM-generated philosophy and analyze why it's good. The self-referential move: if this paper is good philosophy and was written with LLM assistance, that's a demonstration. But this is tricky — it's potentially question-begging, and it doesn't show _how_ to generate good philosophy. Option B: A discussion of prompting techniques — explain the difference between problem-oriented prompts (asking a question) and solution-oriented prompts (providing partial gestures toward a solution for completion). The transcript provides material for this: - One-shot vs. conversational prompting - Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented prompts - "Good continuation" as a framing - The autonomy continuum (from human-does-everything to LLM-is-autonomous) Option C: Both — theoretical discussion of prompting plus a worked example. My inclination: Option C is most compelling but also most ambitious. The paper could: 1. Discuss the prompting taxonomy (one-shot vs. conversational, problem- vs. solution-oriented) 2. Connect this to the "good continuation" framing 3. Provide a worked example showing how the same philosophical problem yields different quality outputs depending on prompting approach 4. Note the self-referential point as a bonus observation This could be 1,500-2,500 words and would significantly strengthen the paper. **Issue 4: Bayesianism** The co-author mentions "benzianism" (Bayesianism?) as something not finished. Looking at Floridi et al.'s paper (I see it's extracted in the Learning folder), they discuss abduction in relation to Bayesianism. Actually, looking more carefully at the Lipton book structure in the Learning folder — there's "Lipton - Ch07 Bayesian Abduction.md". And the current Section 2 of the paper quotes Lipton but doesn't engage Bayesian approaches specifically. Is this a gap? The Floridi et al. objection is about _stochastic_ processing, not about Bayesian inference per se. I'm not sure Bayesianism is crucial here. But it might be worth checking whether Floridi et al. make claims about Bayesian reasoning that the paper should address. Given the transcript's uncertainty ("I don't know how relevant it can be to what we say"), I'd treat this as lower priority. If there's space, a brief engagement with Bayesian abduction could go in Section 2 or 3. **Issue 5: Clarifying the Einstein example** The co-author mentions the "Einstein principle of equivalence" might need clarification. Looking at the current paper, Section 2 discusses Einstein's formulation of the equivalence principle as Zahavy's paradigm case of manipulative abduction. The point is already explained: "Einstein did not have data sufficient to infer general relativity inductively; Newtonian mechanics faced no empirical crisis, and the anomaly of Mercury's perihelion was attributed to an undiscovered planet rather than a flaw in Newton's laws... Einstein imagined himself inside a falling elevator. He simulated the sensations of an observer in that scenario..." This seems clear enough. But the co-author might be saying: for audiences unfamiliar with the equivalence principle (that gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable), a sentence of clarification would help. Something like: "The equivalence principle states that an observer in free fall experiences no gravitational field — equivalently, that the effects of gravity and uniform acceleration are indistinguishable." This is a minor clarification, not a structural change. **Issue 6: The autonomy/collaboration distinction** The transcript discusses whether "LLMs can do philosophy" means autonomous philosophy or collaborative philosophy. This is connected to Section 4 (prompting), but it's also a conceptual distinction that might need explicit treatment earlier in the paper. Looking at the current paper... This distinction is not made explicit. The paper argues that LLMs _can_ produce philosophy, but doesn't clearly address whether this requires human collaboration. Where should this go? Option A: In the Introduction — disambiguate the question at the outset. Option B: In Section 4 — frame the prompting discussion with this distinction. Option C: Both — introduce the distinction early, develop it later. My inclination: This is important enough to introduce early (perhaps in the Introduction) and develop in Section 4. The Introduction could add a paragraph: "A further ambiguity concerns the degree of autonomy. 'LLMs can do philosophy' might mean that LLMs can produce good philosophy when given only a question (autonomous philosophy), or that LLMs can contribute meaningfully to philosophical work in collaboration with human philosophers. Our argument is primarily about the latter — that LLM outputs can meet philosophical standards when appropriately prompted and refined. Whether fully autonomous LLM philosophy is possible is a further question we do not settle here." This sets up appropriate expectations and makes the Section 4 discussion of prompting coherent. **Issue 7: The Walton paper on "categories of art" and imaginative resistance** The co-author mentions Walton's influential paper on categories of art and imaginative resistance as examples of areas where experience matters. These are aesthetics topics. The current paper doesn't engage aesthetics specifically. Is this a gap? The paper is about philosophy in general, and the main examples come from metaphysics, language, and mind. Adding aesthetics examples could strengthen the case by showing breadth. But it could also distract. Looking at the current structure... The thought experiment examples (Twin Earth, Mary, Chinese Room, teleporter) are all from philosophy of mind/language/metaphysics. Adding Walton's categories example could show that even aesthetics — which might seem more experience-dependent — operates textually. Walton's argument is that correct aesthetic perception requires knowing the _category_ of a work; but what counts as a category is articulated through examples, arguments, and conceptual analysis — i.e., textually. This is interesting but might be a stretch for the current paper. I'd treat it as optional expansion material. **Issue 8: "Repository of second-hand experience"** This phrase from the transcript is valuable. The co-author says: "this kind of experience. It's already sedimented in the data set... there are history data set or the good diary autobiography data set." And Nick responds: "a repository of experiences is really nice way of thinking about it actually. Yeah, or second. The hand actually is good." This framing deserves explicit statement in the paper. The response to the experience-objection shouldn't just be "philosophy is textual" but "the corpus contains rich experiential descriptions that function as second-hand experience." **Issue 9: Gelfert's Chinese Room comparison in Zahavy** Looking at the current Section 2, there's a quote from Zahavy (or Harnad) about LLMs as "high-dimensional 'Chinese Rooms'". This is important for the dialectic. The co-author mentions this in passing ("Chinese zombies"). The current paper handles this: "Zahavy quotes Harnad's phrase: LLMs are 'high-dimensional "Chinese Rooms", manipulating the language of physics without access to the physical referents that give that language meaning'." This seems adequately handled. No change needed. **Issue 10: The self-proving move** Nick mentions "in the first version it was fun because you you presented that as a self-proving say oh this paper is." This is an earlier version's move that was apparently dropped. Should it be restored? The self-proving move: if this paper is good philosophy, and it was co-written with an LLM, then it demonstrates that LLMs can produce good philosophy. Pros: - Elegant, punchy - Payoff for the Hitchhiker's Guide setup - Meta-philosophical cleverness Cons: - Potentially question-begging (the paper's quality is contested, so it can't serve as uncontested evidence) - Might seem gimmicky - Doesn't show _how_ to get good philosophy from LLMs My inclination: Don't make the self-proving move the _main_ point of Section 4, but it could be mentioned as a secondary observation. Something like: "One might note that this paper itself was co-written with an LLM. If the arguments here are clear, the objections are fairly stated, and the subject matter is illuminated, then the paper demonstrates its own thesis. We do not rest on this observation — what the reader evaluates is the textual product before them." **Issue 11: Semiotic physics / good continuation framing** The transcript mentions "semiotic physics" and the concept of "good continuation." Looking at the Learning folder, there's "A Note on Semiotic Physics by metasemi.md" and "Simulators Seminar 2 - Semiotic Physics by Jan.md" and "Simulators by Janus.md." This is a framework from AI safety/philosophy of AI that treats LLMs as "simulators" whose outputs are continuations of prompts. The quality of the output depends on setting up a prompt context where "good continuation" = desired behavior. Is this appropriate for the paper? It's more technical and comes from a specific community (AI safety, rationalist-adjacent). It might alienate some philosophy readers who aren't familiar with this discourse. On the other hand, it's a genuinely useful framing for understanding how to get good philosophy from LLMs. The paper could introduce it without heavy terminology: "The structure of generative language models suggests a way to think about prompting. These models produce text by predicting what comes next — technically, by sampling from a probability distribution over possible continuations. To elicit good philosophy, one must construct a prompt context where the most probable continuations _are_ good philosophy. This is achieved not merely by asking philosophical questions, but by providing partial gestures toward solutions that the model can elaborate, refine, and strengthen." This is the core insight without the "semiotic physics" terminology. --- Okay, let me now step back and think about what the transcript actually _requires_ vs. what it _suggests_ vs. what it _opens as possibilities_... **Clearly required:** 1. Section 4 on demonstration/prompting needs to exist 2. The experience-objection (consciousness/phenomenology) needs to be addressed 3. The intuitions objection should probably be addressed **Strongly suggested:** 4. The "repository of experiences" response should be articulated 5. The autonomy/collaboration distinction should be made explicit 6. The paper needs to grow to 6,000-8,000 words **Possibly useful:** 7. Engagement with Bayesianism (if space) 8. Clarification of Einstein equivalence principle (minor) 9. Aesthetics examples (Walton, imaginative resistance) as extension of the argument 10. The self-proving move as a note in Section 4 11. Good continuation / prompting taxonomy --- Now let me think about what the _best_ way to organize these changes is... The paper currently has: - Section 0 (Introduction): ~500 words - Section 1 (Philosophy in the Text): ~650 words - Section 2 (LLMs and Abduction): ~700 words - Section 3 (Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction): ~1000 words - Total: ~2850 words (not 4000 as stated in the transcript — maybe the transcript was about a different version?) Actually, wait. The session note says: "Alternative approach (Text-Internal Evaluation): A second Longform project now exists at `Writing/research/generating-philosophy-text-internal-evaluation/`..." So this is the _alternative_ project, not the main one. The 4,000 words might refer to the other version at `Writing/research/generating philosophy with ai (paper)/`. Looking at the current alternative project structure: - Section 0: Introduction - Section 1: Philosophy in the Text - Section 2: LLMs and Abduction - Section 3: Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction The session note's "Sections" for the _main_ project are: 0. Introduction 1. What LLMs Aren't Doing (Floridi + Zahavy) 2. Abduction and Philosophy (Williamson; artefact-level evaluation) 3. Learning the Game (positive case) 4. How to Generate Philosophy with AI (demonstration) 5. Conclusion So the alternative project has a different structure. The transcript seems to be discussing the alternative project (since it mentions Watson/Crick vs Kripke, which is in Section 1 of the alternative project). This affects interpretation. The changes should be applied to the _alternative_ project structure: - Section 0: Introduction - Section 1: Philosophy in the Text - Section 2: LLMs and Abduction - Section 3: Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction - Need to add: Section 4 (demonstration) - Need to add: intuitions and experience objections, probably in Section 3 or as part of Section 4 --- Let me also think about the co-author's concerns more carefully. The co-author seems to be: 1. Generally satisfied with the current state for the presentation 2. Identifying areas for expansion 3. Raising potential objections the paper should address 4. Thinking about how to make the paper journal-ready The tone is collaborative and exploratory — "I was wondering whether" — not prescriptive. This suggests the changes should be presented as options for Nick to consider, not as directives. --- Okay, I think I have a comprehensive picture. Let me now organize this into a detailed list with reasoning for each item, as requested. <final_answer> ## Comprehensive Analysis: Changes Required for "Generating Philosophy - Text-Internal Evaluation" Having worked through the transcript against the current paper sections (0, 1, 2, 3), I've identified substantive philosophical issues, structural gaps, and strategic decisions. Below is a detailed treatment of each, with reasoning and options. I'm grouping these thematically rather than in order of importance — they are parallel threads for you to consider. --- ### 1. THE INTUITIONS OBJECTION **What the transcript says:** Your co-author flags Machery's book on metaphilosophy as relevant to "the role of intuitions in philosophy" — potentially "the most substantial objection." **What the current paper lacks:** No explicit engagement with intuitions. The paper argues philosophical evaluation is text-internal, but doesn't address the worry that intuitions (as private mental states) play an evidential role that can't be captured textually. **Why this matters:** Intuitions feature prominently in analytic methodology — Gettier cases, Twin Earth, moral dilemmas. If intuitions are _evidence_ philosophers use, and LLMs lack intuitions, perhaps LLMs can't do philosophy properly even on text-internal criteria. **Three approaches:** **(A) The articulation response** Intuitions, _as they enter philosophical discourse_, are articulated: "We have the intuition that Oscar and Twin Oscar mean different things." What subsequent philosophers engage is the _articulated intuition_, not the original mental state. Whether Putnam "really felt" the intuition is not what evaluation concerns — what matters is whether the argument handles the intuition-as-datum well. _Strength:_ Consistent with the paper's overall strategy (evaluation concerns textual products). _Cost:_ Might seem to reduce intuitions to mere data points, which some philosophers would resist. **(B) The functional equivalence response** LLMs trained on philosophical texts have absorbed patterns of intuition-appeal. When they generate text like "it seems that p" or "intuitively, q," they're tracking the same patterns that intuitions track in humans. Whether this constitutes "having intuitions" is irrelevant — what matters is that the outputs handle intuition-based reasoning competently. _Strength:_ Engages the empirical question about LLMs. _Cost:_ Makes a claim about LLM cognition that could be contested. **(C) The scope limitation response** Acknowledge that intuition-heavy philosophy (experimental philosophy's targets) might be an area where the argument applies less cleanly. Focus the claim on philosophy that doesn't depend heavily on raw intuition elicitation. _Strength:_ Honest about limits. _Cost:_ Narrows the claim perhaps too much. **My inclination:** Option A is strongest and most consistent with the paper's architecture. The move should go in Section 3, after the discussion of thought experiments. Something like: > One might object that philosophical thought experiments elicit _intuitions_ — private mental states that serve as evidence. If LLMs lack intuitions, perhaps they cannot engage thought experiments properly. But notice that intuitions, as they enter the philosophical literature, are articulated: 'we have the intuition that the person who exits the teleporter is the same person,' or 'intuitively, Oscar and Twin Oscar mean different things.' These articulations are what subsequent philosophers engage. To evaluate Parfit's use of the teleporter case, one examines whether his arguments handle the relevant intuitions correctly — whether they are stated fairly, whether counterintuitions are considered, whether the dialectic around them is competently managed. These are textual assessments. --- ### 2. THE EXPERIENCE-DEPENDENT PHILOSOPHY OBJECTION **What the transcript says:** Your co-author raises philosophy of mind/consciousness and aesthetics as areas where "acquaintance" with phenomenal experience seems required. Philosophy of consciousness might "require acquaintance" with its subject matter. Aesthetics might require actually experiencing artworks, feeling imaginative resistance, etc. **What the current paper lacks:** The Introduction acknowledges practitioner-focused conceptions (Hadot, Merleau-Ponty) but treats these as different metaphilosophical frameworks. Your co-author's point is subtler: _within_ the text-focused framework, some _areas_ of philosophy might still require experiential input LLMs lack. **Why this matters:** This is a scope objection. If the paper's argument only applies to "mathematical" philosophy (logic, formal metaphysics) and not to phenomenology or aesthetics, that's a significant limitation worth acknowledging. **Three approaches:** **(A) The "repository of experiences" response** Your co-author gives you this move: the corpus isn't just concepts and arguments but also _descriptions of experiences_. Phenomenological philosophy itself contains rich characterizations of what experiences are like. Diaries, autobiographies, novels — these describe phenomenal states in detail. This is "second-hand experience" that LLMs can access. _Strength:_ This is a genuinely interesting move that reframes what's in the training data. _Cost:_ One might argue second-hand descriptions are insufficient — you have to actually _feel_ what it's like. **(B) The textual practice response** Even phenomenology and philosophy of consciousness are evaluated textually. We assess whether Chalmers's zombie argument is valid, whether Nagel's bat argument works, whether Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions are illuminating — and these assessments concern argument structure, conceptual clarity, handling of objections. The subjective experiences that _prompted_ these arguments are not what we evaluate. _Strength:_ Applies the paper's general strategy to these cases. _Cost:_ Might seem to dismiss what's distinctive about phenomenology. **(C) The scope acknowledgment response** Explicitly limit the claim: "Our argument applies most clearly to areas of philosophy that operate at a high level of conceptual abstraction — metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language. Whether LLMs can contribute to phenomenology, where the subject matter is first-person experience, is a further question we do not attempt to settle." _Strength:_ Honest, clear. _Cost:_ Significantly narrows the claim. **My inclination:** Combine A and B. The paper should: 1. Acknowledge the objection explicitly (philosophy of mind/consciousness, aesthetics as potential problem cases) 2. Offer the "repository of experiences" move (the corpus contains rich experiential descriptions) 3. Add that even experience-dependent philosophy is _evaluated_ by textual standards This could be 300-500 words in Section 3 (or a new paragraph after Section 3's main argument). Your co-author's phrase "repository of second-hand experience" is genuinely valuable — I'd quote it or develop it explicitly. Something like: > The philosophical corpus is not merely a repository of concepts and arguments but also a repository of _experiences_, recorded second-hand. Phenomenological philosophy consists largely of detailed descriptions of what experiences are like — their temporal structure, their intentional character, the way they present objects. Diaries, autobiographies, and novels provide further characterizations of phenomenal states. An LLM trained on this material has access not to experiences themselves but to something that may be sufficient for philosophical purposes: articulated descriptions of experiences, which is what philosophical arguments about experience typically engage. --- ### 3. SECTION 4: DEMONSTRATION AND PROMPTING **What the transcript says:** You and your co-author agree that Section 4 (demonstration) is needed. Someone will ask: "If LLMs can do philosophy, show us." Two approaches: (1) actual demonstration, (2) discussion of prompting techniques. **What the current paper lacks:** Section 4 doesn't exist in the alternative project. The structure ends at Section 3. **Why this matters:** The paper makes a capability claim ("LLMs can produce philosophy meeting philosophical standards"). Without demonstration or discussion of how, the claim is unsupported assertion. **Options for Section 4:** **(A) Prompting taxonomy** Distinguish types of prompting: - One-shot vs. conversational (single question vs. iterative refinement) - Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented (asking a question vs. providing partial gestures toward a solution) - The "good continuation" framing: LLMs produce probable continuations of their prompt context. To get good philosophy, construct contexts where good continuations = good philosophy. _Strength:_ Provides concrete guidance. Connects to the semiotic physics / simulators literature without requiring that terminology. _Cost:_ Might seem like practical advice rather than philosophy. **(B) Worked example** Take a philosophical problem and show how different prompting approaches yield different quality outputs. For instance: prompt an LLM with "solve the Gettier problem" (one-shot, problem-oriented) vs. giving it the dialectical setup and asking it to articulate a position that handles specific objections (solution-oriented, conversational). _Strength:_ Concrete evidence. _Cost:_ Requires actually doing the demonstration, which raises questions about which model, which prompt, etc. **(C) The self-referential observation** Note that this paper itself was co-written with LLMs. If the paper is good philosophy, it demonstrates its own thesis. _Strength:_ Elegant, punchy. Payoff for the Hitchhiker's Guide setup. _Cost:_ Question-begging (the paper's quality is what's being judged). Should not bear argumentative weight. **(D) Combination approach** - Start with the autonomy/collaboration distinction (more on this below) - Present the prompting taxonomy (A) - Optionally include a worked example (B) - Note the self-referential point as a side observation, not the main argument (C) **My inclination:** Option D is most robust. The section might look like: > §4. How to Generate Philosophy with AI > > The question "can LLMs do philosophy?" is ambiguous in at least one further way. It might mean: can LLMs produce good philosophy autonomously, given only a question? Or it might mean: can LLMs contribute meaningfully to philosophical work in collaboration with human philosophers? Our argument has primarily concerned the latter... > > [Discussion of prompting taxonomy] > > [Optional: worked example] > > One might note, finally, that this paper itself was co-written with an LLM. If the arguments are clear, the objections fairly stated, and the subject matter illuminated, then the paper demonstrates its own thesis. We do not rest on this observation — what the reader evaluates is the textual product before them, which is precisely the point. --- ### 4. THE AUTONOMY/COLLABORATION DISTINCTION **What the transcript says:** Your co-author raises this: "'can do philosophy' can mean two things: can do philosophy while in collaboration with human philosophers or can do philosophy on their own." And: "the less interesting the claim becomes the further along you get towards the prompter having to do all the work." **What the current paper lacks:** No explicit disambiguation of autonomous vs. collaborative LLM philosophy. **Why this matters:** The paper's thesis is ambiguous without this. If the claim is just "LLMs can be useful writing aids for philosophers," that's much weaker than "LLMs can do philosophy independently." **Options:** **(A) Disambiguate early (Introduction), develop later (Section 4)** Add a paragraph to the Introduction: > A further ambiguity concerns the degree of autonomy. 'LLMs can do philosophy' might mean that LLMs can produce good philosophy given only a question (autonomous philosophy), or that LLMs can contribute meaningfully to philosophical work in collaboration with human philosophers. Our argument primarily concerns the latter. We argue that LLM outputs Interrupted · What should Claudian do instead? "words might refer to the other version at writing/research/generating philosophy with ai (paper) / •" ignore this old version, it's irrelevant. Understood — I'll ignore the old version at `Writing/research/generating philosophy with ai (paper)/` and work only with the current draft at `Writing/research/generating-philosophy-text-internal-evaluation/`. Let me now proceed with the deep contemplative analysis of the transcript against the current paper sections. Right, so I need to go through this transcript with a fine-toothed comb and identify everything that needs to change in the paper. The transcript is a conversation between Nick and his co-author (sounds like an Italian colleague, possibly Andrea or similar based on speech patterns and mention of teaching, the Milan conference venue "Sinaloa Mazzini"). Let me work through this systematically. The transcript is messy — it's a voice recording transcription with errors, interruptions, tangents about presentation logistics. I need to extract the substantive philosophical discussion from the noise. **First pass: What are they actually discussing?** 1. "It seems that Florida. It's again, a problem with the process" — clearly "Floridi" not "Florida". They're discussing that the paper puts too much emphasis on the process. The co-author is saying the only objection where the connection to the process is relevant is the idea that the process puts constraints on the text. 2. "Benzianism" — this is garbled. What could this be? "Bayesianism"? Given the context of the paper discussing abduction and inference, Bayesianism would make sense. The co-author says "this is just an orange suspicion" — probably "a vague suspicion" or "a lingering suspicion". They haven't finished dealing with Bayesianism in the paper. 3. "The Einstein principle of equivalence" — this relates to the Zahavy paper's discussion of Einstein's thought experiment. The co-author says "it's already that zombie paper" — meaning the zombie paper (Chalmers? or Zahavy's paper?) already explains the principle, so they don't need to explain it themselves. 4. "The most substantial objection may be related to the role of intuitions in philosophy" — this is a NEW objection thread they're identifying. The co-author mentions "the charter Mercedes book" — this is clearly "the Machery book" (Edouard Machery, who wrote about intuitions in philosophy, probably "Doing Without Concepts" or his work on experimental philosophy and intuitions). They're saying this is influential on meta-philosophy. 5. "Areas of philosophy in which appeal to experience, even introspection" — they're discussing whether there are domains of philosophy (philosophy of mind, consciousness) where the subject matter requires acquaintance, first-person experience. This would be a limitation on the LLM-can-do-philosophy claim. 6. "Because we doesn't care so much about that because it's not the kind of philosophy interested in, it's more of your doing language metaphysics, modal logic" — they're acknowledging that the paper's scope might be limited to certain "mathematical-like" philosophy, not phenomenology or consciousness studies. 7. "Evaluative philosophy like aesthetics" — another domain where experience matters. 8. Discussion of Walton's "Categories of Art" paper — the co-author mentions "historical category like impressionism" and engagement with works of art. This is Kendall Walton's influential paper on how categorical perception affects aesthetic experience. 9. "Imaginative resistance" — Tamar Szabó Gendler's concept. The co-author is saying these concepts require you to _feel_ something, not just manipulate concepts. 10. **The repository of experiences idea** — this is a significant new framing. The co-author suggests that the data set isn't just a repository of concepts and arguments but also a "repository of experience, second-hand experience." Nick responds: "a repository of experiences is really nice way of thinking about it actually." 11. Discussion of what intuitions are — "like perception, but at an intellectual level... grasping ideas, propositions... that's also why some philosophers denied that intuitions really exist precisely because thought cannot be grasped in a perceptual, straightforward, non-mediated way." 12. **Mathematical axioms and principles** as things we "just grasp" without deduction. 13. **Zombies and conceivability** — the intuition that zombies are conceivable. "We cannot perceive them, but there is, we have the sense that they can [be] like us but they don't have consciousness." 14. **The demonstration question** — Nick says: "Someone's going to say, okay, in that case, prove it. Show us. Show us an LLM doing good philosophy." Two options: actual demonstration, or at least showing how to get LLMs to do good philosophy via prompting techniques. 15. **The self-proving joke** — in an earlier version, the paper presented itself as self-proving: "if you think this paper is good" (and it was written with LLM assistance), then QED. 16. **Prompting and autonomy** — "can do philosophy" means two things: in collaboration with humans, or on their own. The further along the continuum toward the prompter doing all the work, the less interesting the claim. 17. **Types of prompts** — one-shot vs. conversational/iterative. "Solve the mind-body problem" vs. iterative development with adjustments. 18. **Good continuation** — from semiotic physics. The prompt should be such that its "good continuation" is good philosophy. Two senses: shallow (answer continues question) and interesting (prompt gestures toward solution, LLM makes it robust). 19. **Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented prompts** — problem-oriented: state problem, good continuation is answer. Solution-oriented: already point toward solution, good continuation develops it further. 20. **Paper length/venue** — currently 4000 words, aiming for 6000-8000. Possibly big journals (Philosophical Review, Mind, Journal of Philosophy). Hong Kong conference mentioned as good feedback venue. **Second pass: What does this mean for the paper?** Now I need to map these discussion points onto the actual paper sections I've read. Let me think about each substantive issue: --- **ISSUE 1: "Too much emphasis on the process"** The co-author says the paper puts too much emphasis on the process argument. Looking at Section 2 ("LLMs and Abduction"), the paper does spend substantial space on Floridi et al.'s account of LLM mechanisms — zeroth-order abduction, stochastic generation, etc. The co-author's point seems to be: the only objection where process really matters is the claim that process constrains the text's properties. Otherwise, process is irrelevant (as the paper itself argues!). This is somewhat self-undermining: if the paper's thesis is that process is evaluatively irrelevant, why spend so much time on process? The answer is that Floridi and Zahavy _do_ make process-based arguments, so they need to be addressed. But perhaps the paper over-explains the mechanics. **Options:** (A) Trim the mechanical explanation of LLM processes in Section 2, keeping only what's necessary to understand Floridi's objection (B) Reframe the mechanical discussion as "what critics think the process is" rather than "what the process actually is" — emphasizing that even if this description is correct, it doesn't matter for evaluation (C) Keep the current balance but add a clear meta-statement: "We describe these mechanisms not because they are evaluatively relevant, but because critics have claimed they preclude philosophical output" My inclination: (B) or (C). The paper should acknowledge the tension between spending time on process while arguing process is irrelevant. --- **ISSUE 2: Bayesianism** The co-author says Bayesianism "hasn't been quite finished off yet." Looking at the current draft, I don't see explicit engagement with Bayesian objections. What would a Bayesian objection look like? Perhaps: Bayesian accounts of belief revision require _actually updating_ beliefs based on evidence, not just outputting probable continuations. LLMs don't have beliefs in the relevant sense; they don't update credences. If philosophy requires genuine belief-revision... But wait — Lipton's book has a chapter on "Bayesian Abduction" (Chapter 7). The paper quotes Lipton but I don't see engagement with the Bayesian dimension. **Options:** (A) Add a paragraph addressing Bayesian objections explicitly — perhaps that philosophical evaluation doesn't require the producer to have beliefs, only that the text exhibits the right properties (B) Acknowledge that Bayesian epistemology presents additional challenges beyond what Floridi and Zahavy raise, and bracket it as beyond the paper's scope (C) Argue that Bayesian updating is a diachronic constraint on _reasoners_, not on _texts_ — and the paper focuses on text evaluation My inclination: This depends on how serious the objection is. If it's a standard objection the referees will raise, it needs addressing. If it's more speculative, a footnote might suffice. --- **ISSUE 3: The Einstein equivalence principle / Zahavy** The co-author says the Einstein case is "already in the zombie paper" — I think they mean Zahavy's paper already explains the equivalence principle thought experiment, so they don't need to explain it themselves. Looking at Section 2, the paper does explain this: > Einstein imagined himself inside a falling elevator. He simulated the sensations of an observer in that scenario — objects released from the hand appearing to hover, the floor rushing up to meet falling things — and abduced from that simulated experience that gravity and acceleration must be the same phenomenon. This is a good summary. The question is whether it needs more or less. The co-author seems to think it's fine as is. **Options:** (A) Keep current treatment (B) Add a citation or quotation from Zahavy directly describing the Einstein case (C) Trim the description since it's familiar from Zahavy My inclination: (A) or (B) — the current treatment is appropriately detailed. A direct Zahavy quote might strengthen it. --- **ISSUE 4: The role of intuitions — Machery book** This is a significant potential objection the co-authors have identified but not yet incorporated. The objection: philosophical arguments often rely on _intuitions_ — pre-theoretical judgments that seem to be grasped directly (like perceptual content, but at an intellectual level). If intuitions are constitutive of philosophical method, and LLMs cannot have intuitions (because they lack the relevant intellectual perception), then LLMs cannot do philosophy. The Machery literature (experimental philosophy) is about whether intuitions are reliable, whether they vary across cultures, etc. But the relevant point here is about what intuitions _are_ — whether they require a kind of intellectual experience that LLMs lack. This connects to the phenomenology/consciousness objection mentioned in the Introduction's footnote about practitioner-focused conceptions of philosophy. **Options:** (A) Add a new section or substantial paragraph on intuitions (B) Address intuitions briefly, arguing that what matters for evaluation is whether the text handles the intuitive data correctly, not whether the producer "had" the intuition (C) Restrict the paper's scope explicitly to "non-intuition-heavy" philosophy — but this might weaken the claim significantly (D) Argue that intuitions, as they appear in philosophical texts, are _expressed_ intuitions — the text says "intuitively, X seems Y" — and LLMs can process and deploy these expressed intuitions from the corpus My inclination: This is tricky. Option (D) has promise — it's consistent with the paper's text-focused approach. The intuition isn't a private mental state; it's a move in argumentative space, recorded in text. The corpus contains millions of intuition-reports, and LLMs have learned when and how to deploy them. But wait — the co-author makes a more interesting move. They suggest the data set is a "repository of second-hand experience." This reframes the objection: even if LLMs don't have experiences themselves, the corpus records human experiences, and LLMs can draw on these recorded experiences. This is actually quite sophisticated. It's similar to how a historian who never experienced WWII can write about it using recorded testimonies. The LLM's relationship to intuitions is mediated by the corpus in the same way. --- **ISSUE 5: Philosophy of mind/consciousness as a special case** The co-author raises this: philosophy of mind and consciousness might require _acquaintance_ with conscious experience. If you've never experienced qualia, how can you philosophize about them? Nick says the co-author "doesn't care so much about that" because he's more interested in language, metaphysics, modal logic — "mathematical-like philosophy." This suggests a scope restriction might be appropriate. **Options:** (A) Restrict the paper's claim to certain domains of philosophy, acknowledging that phenomenology/consciousness studies may be different (B) Argue that even philosophy of consciousness is conducted textually — Mary's Room, zombies, etc. are thought experiments articulated in language — so the text-internal evaluation approach still applies (C) Acknowledge this as a limitation without fully resolving it Looking at Section 3, the paper actually makes the (B) move: > Consider how philosophical thought experiments actually work. Take Putnam's Twin Earth case... Notice what this thought experiment does not require. It does not require anyone to simulate the sensations of being on Twin Earth or drinking XYZ. The thought experiment is articulated entirely in language, recorded in text, and does its intellectual work at the level of concepts and propositions. And: > The same is true of Jackson's Mary, Searle's Chinese Room, Parfit's teleporter, and every other philosophical thought experiment in the literature. They are textual objects, and the work they do is textual work. So the paper already has resources for this response. But the co-author seems to be pointing at something different: not thought experiments _about_ consciousness, but the role of _actually being conscious_ in evaluating them. Hmm. This is genuinely difficult. When Jackson asks us to imagine Mary learning what red looks like, part of the thought experiment's force comes from our own acquaintance with color experience. If an LLM has never experienced anything, can it grasp what's at stake? But the paper could respond: what matters is whether the _text_ handles the arguments correctly. An LLM-produced text might say "Mary gains knowledge she didn't have before" and deploy this correctly in an argument about physicalism, without the LLM having any phenomenal experience. The evaluation is of whether the argument works, not whether the producer grasped the phenomenal dimension. **Options for the paper:** (A) Add a paragraph acknowledging philosophy of consciousness as a potential limitation, but argue that even here, evaluation is textual (B) Be more careful about scope — explicitly claim the argument applies to "analytic philosophy of the sort conducted primarily through argument and counterexample" rather than phenomenological inquiry (C) Use the "repository of second-hand experience" move — the corpus contains extensive reports of conscious experience, and the LLM can draw on these My inclination: A combination. The paper should (1) acknowledge the objection about phenomenology/consciousness, (2) argue that even here the texts are what get evaluated, but (3) concede that this is a harder case than logic or metaphysics. --- **ISSUE 6: Evaluative philosophy / aesthetics** The co-author mentions aesthetics as another domain where experience matters. Walton's "Categories of Art" is about how our aesthetic experience depends on which categories we perceive an artwork as belonging to — whether we see Guernica as a Cubist painting or as a bizarre representation affects our experience of it. Gendler's "imaginative resistance" is about the difficulty of imaginatively engaging with scenarios that violate our moral or metaphysical commitments. Both of these involve _experiencing_ art or fiction in certain ways. Can LLMs do aesthetics if they don't have aesthetic experiences? Again, the paper's response is likely: aesthetic _philosophy_ is conducted textually. Walton's paper is an argument, not an experience. Its quality is assessed by how it handles objections, clarifies the phenomenon, etc. An LLM could produce a good paper on categories of art even if it has no aesthetic experiences, because the paper is evaluated on argumentative merits. But the co-author has an interesting point: to introduce the concept of imaginative resistance, you have to _feel_ some resistance when engaging with certain fictions. This is experiential data that grounds the concept. If LLMs don't read fiction and feel resistance, how can they theorize about it? The "repository of experiences" response: the corpus contains descriptions of imaginative resistance, people reporting feeling resistance, etc. The LLM can work with these reports. **Options:** (A) Add a paragraph on aesthetics as a case study, showing how the argument applies even here (B) Acknowledge aesthetics as a harder case, but argue evaluation is still textual (C) Use the Walton/Gendler examples specifically to illustrate how even experientially-grounded concepts are introduced and deployed textually My inclination: (C) could work nicely. Turn the objection into a worked example. --- **ISSUE 7: The repository of experiences / second-hand experience** This is a genuinely new and interesting framing that emerged in the conversation. The co-author says: the data set is "not only as a repository of concepts and arguments but also as a repository of experience, second-hand experience." Nick responds enthusiastically: "a repository of experiences is really nice way of thinking about it actually." This deserves incorporation into the paper. It's a positive response to the intuitions/experience/phenomenology objections. The idea: the philosophical corpus doesn't just contain arguments; it contains records of human experience. When philosophers write about what it's like to see red, or feel resistance to a fiction, or have a memory-experience, they're depositing experiential data into the corpus. An LLM trained on this corpus has access to vast amounts of second-hand experience. This doesn't mean the LLM _has_ experiences. It means the LLM has access to _reports_ of experiences, and can reason about and deploy these reports in philosophical arguments. This is actually a strong response to the consciousness/phenomenology objection. It's not that LLMs need first-hand experience; the question is whether they can work with experiential data, and they can — via the corpus. **Options:** (A) Add a substantial paragraph or subsection introducing this "repository of second-hand experience" framing (B) Integrate this into the existing discussion of the corpus in Section 3 (C) Use this as the response to the intuitions/phenomenology objection specifically My inclination: (A) or (B). This deserves explicit development as it's a genuinely novel and useful framing. --- **ISSUE 8: The demonstration question** Nick raises this: "Someone's going to say, okay, in that case, prove it. Show us an LLM doing good philosophy." The paper currently has a Section 4 planned for demonstration/worked examples, but the sections I've read are 0-3 only. This is flagged as a gap. Two approaches Nick mentions: (A) An actual demonstration — LLM-produced philosophy that the reader can evaluate (B) Discussion of prompting techniques — how to get LLMs to produce good philosophy The self-proving angle is mentioned: "if you think this paper is good" (and it was written with LLM assistance), then there's your proof. But Nick seems unsure whether to include this. **Options:** (A) Include an actual demonstration — perhaps a philosophical argument generated by an LLM on a topic not covered elsewhere in the paper, for the reader to evaluate (B) Discuss prompting methodology — what kinds of prompts elicit good philosophical output, drawing on the "good continuation" framework (C) The self-proving move — acknowledge the paper's own LLM-assisted production (D) Defer the demonstration question — argue that the theoretical case stands independently of any particular demonstration My inclination: The paper needs _something_ here or it will feel incomplete. A combination of (B) and (C) might work: discuss how LLM-human collaboration can produce philosophy, using the present paper as an implicit example without being too cute about it. --- **ISSUE 9: The Hitchhiker's Guide payoff** The Introduction opens with the Deep Thought / "42" joke from Hitchhiker's Guide. Nick mentions it would be nice to have a "payoff" for this setup, and prompting would fit well with it. The joke is about asking the wrong question (or not knowing what the question is). A payoff could be: the right way to get philosophical output from an LLM is to ask the right _kind_ of question — not "solve the mind-body problem" but something more structured. **Options:** (A) Return to the Hitchhiker's reference in Section 4 when discussing prompting (B) Use the joke to frame the prompting discussion: Deep Thought failed because it was given a vague problem; good prompting involves structuring the question appropriately (C) Leave the Hitchhiker's reference as a one-off opening My inclination: (A) or (B) would be satisfying. The paper should call back to its opening. --- **ISSUE 10: Prompting, autonomy, and the collaboration continuum** This is substantial. The co-authors discuss: - "Can do philosophy" means two things: in collaboration, or autonomously - The further toward "prompter does all the work," the less interesting the claim - Different kinds of prompts: one-shot problem statements vs. iterative conversation This connects to the paper's argumentative stakes. If the claim is merely "LLMs can do philosophy with heavy human guidance," that's weaker than "LLMs can do philosophy." **Options:** (A) Add a section or substantial discussion on the collaboration spectrum (B) Clarify the paper's claim — is it about LLMs alone, or human-LLM systems? (C) Argue that the collaboration spectrum doesn't affect the paper's argument, since evaluation is text-internal regardless of how much prompting was involved My inclination: The paper needs to address this, probably in Section 4. The interesting philosophical work is in how to think about collaborative production. --- **ISSUE 11: Good continuation / semiotic physics** Nick introduces the "good continuation" idea from semiotic physics literature (the Janus "Simulators" essay and related work). The idea: what you're really doing when prompting is writing text whose _good continuation_ is good philosophy. Two senses: - Shallow: the answer is a good continuation of the question - Interesting: the prompt already gestures toward a solution, and the good continuation develops it This could be useful in Section 4 for discussing prompting methodology. **Options:** (A) Incorporate "good continuation" as a framework for understanding philosophical prompting (B) Reference semiotic physics literature explicitly (C) Keep this as an informal heuristic rather than formal framework My inclination: (A) seems promising, though it depends on how much space is available. The idea is intuitive and helps explain what good prompting involves. --- **ISSUE 12: Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented prompts** The co-author distinguishes: - Problem-oriented: state a problem, good continuation is an answer - Solution-oriented: already point toward a solution, good continuation develops it further This is useful for Section 4. Solution-oriented prompts involve more collaboration; the human provides intellectual direction. --- **ISSUE 13: Paper scope and venue** Currently ~4000 words. Aiming for 6000-8000. High-profile venues mentioned: Philosophical Review, Mind, Journal of Philosophy. Hong Kong conference for feedback. This is logistical but affects what can be included. With 2000-4000 more words available, there's room to: - Address the intuitions/experience objection properly - Add the "repository of second-hand experience" framing - Include Section 4 on demonstration/prompting - Possibly add a brief Bayesianism discussion --- **Third pass: Organizing the changes** Let me now organize everything into a structured list of changes, with reasoning for each: **GROUP A: Objections to address** 1. **The intuitions objection** — Machery, the role of intellectual perception in philosophy. Paper needs a response. 2. **The phenomenology/consciousness objection** — Does philosophy of mind require acquaintance with conscious experience? Paper needs to at least acknowledge this. 3. **The aesthetics objection** — Does evaluative philosophy require aesthetic experience? Could be folded into the phenomenology discussion. 4. **The Bayesianism objection** — Not fully developed in the transcript, but mentioned as unfinished. **GROUP B: Positive additions** 5. **Repository of second-hand experience** — A strong new framing for how LLMs access experiential data via the corpus. 6. **Section 4: Demonstration** — What would proof look like? Prompting methodology, collaboration, the self-proving angle. 7. **Prompting taxonomy** — One-shot vs. iterative; problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented; good continuation framework. 8. **The collaboration continuum** — Clarify what "can do philosophy" means: alone, or with human guidance? 9. **Hitchhiker's payoff** — Return to the opening joke in Section 4. **GROUP C: Structural/tonal adjustments** 10. **Trim process emphasis in Section 2** — If process is evaluatively irrelevant, don't over-explain it. 11. **Meta-statement about the process discussion** — Acknowledge that describing mechanisms isn't endorsing their evaluative relevance. 12. **Scope clarification** — Is the paper claiming all philosophy, or certain domains? The discussion suggests restricting to "argument-based" philosophy might be prudent. --- Hmm, let me go back through the transcript more carefully to make sure I haven't missed anything... "One thing I haven't done yet, as well is talk about benzianism" — I interpreted this as Bayesianism. But could it be something else? "Benzianism"... I can't think of another philosophical term this could be. In the context of abduction and reasoning, Bayesianism fits. "The Einstein principle of equivalence maybe, but that's all. I think it's already that zombie paper" — "zombie paper" is puzzling. Zahavy's paper is about LLMs "can't jump" — not about zombies. But Zahavy does discuss philosophical zombies briefly? Let me check the paper... Actually, looking at Section 3 of the current draft: > Consider how philosophical thought experiments actually work. Take Putnam's Twin Earth case... The same is true of Jackson's Mary, Searle's Chinese Room, Parfit's teleporter, and every other philosophical thought experiment in the literature. Zombies are philosophical zombies (Chalmers). The co-author might be saying Zahavy's paper or some related paper already discusses zombies. Or they could be saying the Einstein case is already in "Zahavy's paper" (mispronounced as "zombie paper" by the transcription). Actually, I think "zombie paper" is a transcription error for "Zahavy paper." The sounds are similar: Zahavy → zombie in a transcription error makes sense. Let me re-read: "I think it's already that zombie paper, so it's not a problem for us to explain the principle." This makes sense as: "Zahavy's paper already explains the equivalence principle, so we don't need to." Moving on... "the charter Mercedes book" — definitely "the Machery book." Edouard Machery wrote extensively on intuitions and experimental philosophy. "philosophical zombies... we have the sense that they can [be] like us but they don't have consciousness" — this is discussing zombies as a case where intuitions are required. The conceivability of zombies is an intuition, and introducing the concept requires having this intuition. "evaluative philosophy like aesthetics" — lowercase, not referring to a specific theorist. "for instance the actions in mathematics and the principles not in transition is something that these things we just grasp it without the need of deducing it from counterpences" — this is garbled but seems to be about mathematical axioms being grasped intuitively, not deduced. "we may also try the super big journals like philosophical review or mind or Journal of philosophy" — journal submission strategy, not content for the paper. --- **Fourth pass: The intuitions objection in more depth** This feels like the biggest substantive gap the transcript identifies. Let me think about it more carefully. What would the intuitions objection be? Machery's work (I'm drawing on training data here, not the text itself since it's not in the Learning folder) argues that intuitions vary across cultures and may not be reliable. But that's a critique of intuitions, not a claim that they're required for philosophy. A different version: philosophical arguments often _appeal to_ intuitions as evidence. "Intuitively, Gettier cases aren't knowledge." The intuition is invoked as data. If LLMs don't have intuitions, they can't have this data. But the paper's response is clear: intuitions _as they function in philosophy_ are textual objects. The text says "Intuitively, X." The LLM has learned from millions of such statements what is considered intuitive and what isn't. It can deploy intuitions correctly in arguments without "having" them. However, there's a deeper worry. When I say "intuitively, this is unjust," I'm reporting something — a felt response, a seeming. If I don't have felt responses, my reports are mere mimicry of what others have said. This might matter because: 1. Novel cases: what about intuitions in new scenarios? If the LLM is just pattern-matching, it might get novel cases wrong. 2. Sincerity: there's something epistemically suspect about asserting "intuitively, X" when you don't have intuitions. But (2) applies to any assertion the LLM makes. If LLMs aren't sincere (they don't believe what they say), that's a general problem, not specific to intuitions. The paper could note this but set it aside. (1) is more interesting. Novel intuitions. Can LLMs generate correct intuitions about new thought experiments? Actually, this connects to the corpus/saturation thesis. If the corpus contains enough intuition-reports, the LLM can generalize to new cases. Whether these generalizations match what humans would intuit is an empirical question. The paper could say: "We don't claim LLMs have intuitions. We claim they can produce texts that deploy intuitions correctly. Whether they get novel cases right is an empirical question about their training and architecture, not a principled barrier." --- **Fifth pass: The "repository of second-hand experience" idea** This is really nice and deserves development. Let me think about what it means. The philosophical corpus contains: 1. Arguments (the focus of the current paper) 2. Concepts and distinctions 3. Reports of experiences: what philosophers claim it's like to see red, feel pain, experience time passing, feel resistance to a fiction, have a memory-impression, etc. These reports are second-hand in the sense that the LLM doesn't have the experiences itself, but has access to descriptions of them. This is actually how a lot of philosophy works. When Nagel asks "What is it like to be a bat?", we don't actually become bats; we work with concepts and reported intuitions. When Jackson asks about Mary learning what red looks like, most readers haven't been in a black-and-white room; they work with described scenarios. Philosophy of mind is not primarily conducted by introspecting and reporting; it's conducted by reasoning about cases, distinctions, and arguments — all of which are textual. The LLM's position is analogous to a congenitally blind philosopher reasoning about color experiences using reports from sighted people. Is this impossible? No — it might even offer certain advantages (freedom from personal biases about what color experience is like). This should go somewhere in Section 3 or as a new brief section. --- **Sixth pass: Structure of Section 4** The transcript suggests Section 4 should cover: 1. The demand for demonstration 2. Prompting methodology (types of prompts, good continuation) 3. Collaboration vs. autonomy 4. Possible callback to Hitchhiker's The current draft doesn't include Section 4, so this is all new material. A possible structure: > Section 4: Generating Philosophy > > 4.1 The Demonstration Problem > > - Skeptics will demand proof: show us an LLM doing good philosophy > > - Two responses: actual demonstration, or explanation of methodology > > - The self-proving angle: this paper involved LLM collaboration > > 4.2 Prompting and Philosophical Output > > - Not all prompts are equal > > - Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented prompts > > - Good continuation: writing text whose likely continuation is philosophical > > - Callback to Deep Thought: "42" failed because the question was wrong > > 4.3 Collaboration and Autonomy > > - "Can do philosophy" is a spectrum > > - At one extreme: LLM with minimal prompt produces philosophical text > > - At other extreme: human does most work, LLM only polishes > > - The interesting cases are in between > > - This doesn't undermine the paper's argument: evaluation is still text-internal > --- **Seventh pass: What's missing from my analysis?** Let me scan the transcript again for anything I might have under-weighted... "Also the scene or the character of prompts because you're, if the prompt is just 'please solve the mind-body problem,' that's not thought — it seems that in that case, you may say that the LLM is doing philosophy. The problem is just giving a problem to solve." This is interesting. There's a worry that if you just state a problem, the LLM is "doing philosophy" in some sense — it produces philosophical-looking text. But if the prompt is richly specified, the human is doing more of the work. This cuts both ways: - For LLM capabilities: if a bare "solve the mind-body problem" produces good philosophy, that's impressive - For practical use: iterative collaboration might produce better results even if it involves more human guidance The paper should probably not take a strong stance on which is more impressive, but note that evaluation is of the output either way. "there is a more obvious and shallow sense of good continuation, which is just the idea, uh, for which the the the answer is a good continuation of the question. And then, there is a more interesting sense in which the good continuation — the basis for the good continuation is not just a question, but a sort of rough gesturing towards the solution and then the LLM makes the solution much more robust." This is the deep/shallow good continuation distinction. Worth incorporating. "For tomorrow, I feel quite confident" — logistics about presentation, not content. "by the end of the month, maybe we can, or maybe we can wait at the Hong Kong conference" — submission timing. --- **Eighth pass: Thinking about style/voice for these additions** The nick-analytic-voice and nick-philosophical-prose skills are active. Let me orient myself to what additions would look like. From prose-composition.md: > Sentences alternate between longer discursive stretches — with embedded clauses, semicolons, and parenthetical asides — and shorter ones that land a point. > Claims get restated for precision. A characteristic move is the "That is," reformulation: state something, then immediately restate it more carefully. So if I were to sketch a paragraph on "repository of second-hand experience": > The corpus contains more than arguments. Philosophical texts report experiences: what it is like to see red, to feel pain, to have one's memory deceive one. These reports accumulate. An LLM trained on them has access not to experiences themselves but to descriptions of experiences — second-hand acquaintance with what philosophers have claimed about the phenomenal. This is how philosophy typically proceeds. When we consider Mary learning what red looks like, we do not actually become Mary; we work with the scenario as described. That's rough but shows the style direction. For the intuitions paragraph: > Philosophical arguments appeal to intuitions. "Intuitively, Gettier cases are not knowledge." But what is an intuition as it functions in philosophical texts? It is an assertion with a particular form: a claim about what seems to be the case, pre-theoretically, to a competent reader. These assertions are abundant in the corpus. An LLM has learned not the phenomenology of intuiting but the grammar of intuition-reports — when to assert that something is intuitive, what is considered intuitive by the tradition, how intuition-claims function in argument. Whether this suffices for novel cases is an empirical question; it is not a principled bar to producing philosophy. Again rough but indicates direction. --- **Ninth pass: Ranking and dependencies** I'm not supposed to rank Nick's ideas, but I can note dependencies between changes: - The intuitions discussion and the repository-of-experiences discussion are related; the latter is a response to concerns raised by the former. They should probably be sequential. - Section 4 is downstream of Sections 0-3; it needs the groundwork laid. - The process-emphasis adjustment in Section 2 is relatively independent. - The Bayesianism mention is minor and could be a footnote. - The scope question (all philosophy vs. certain domains) affects how the intuitions/phenomenology objections are addressed. --- Okay, I think I have a comprehensive picture now. Let me formulate the final answer. --- ## Final Answer Below is my extraordinarily detailed analysis of the transcript, identifying what needs to change in the paper and reasoning through options for each issue. I'm grouping these by type rather than ranking them. --- ### A. Objections the Paper Needs to Address #### 1. The Intuitions Objection **What the transcript says:** Your co-author mentions "the Machery book" (the transcription garbles this as "charter Mercedes") — likely Edouard Machery's work on intuitions in experimental philosophy. The co-author flags that "the most substantial objection may be related to the role of intuitions in philosophy." They describe intuitions as "like perception, but at an intellectual level... grasping ideas, propositions." **The objection in formal terms:** Philosophical arguments appeal to intuitions as evidence ("Intuitively, Gettier cases aren't knowledge"). Intuitions, on some accounts, involve a kind of intellectual perception — a seeming or direct grasp of a proposition's truth. If LLMs lack this capacity (they don't "grasp" propositions, they predict tokens), then their intuition-talk is hollow mimicry. Worse, they cannot generate _new_ intuitions about novel cases, only recombine existing ones. **Current paper status:** Not addressed. Section 3 discusses thought experiments as textual objects but doesn't engage with intuitions as a methodological category. **Options:** **(A) The textual-function response:** Intuitions, as they function in philosophical texts, are assertions with a characteristic form: "Intuitively, X" or "it seems that X." These assertions are abundant in the corpus. The LLM has learned the _grammar_ of intuition-reports — when to deploy them, what the tradition treats as intuitive, how they function argumentatively. Whether this suffices for novel cases is empirical, not a principled barrier. **(B) The repository response:** The corpus contains not just arguments but accumulated intuition-reports. The LLM has access to what philosophers have _said_ seems intuitive. This is second-hand acquaintance with the intuitive — which is how philosophy typically proceeds anyway (we don't all have intuitions about Gettier cases from scratch; we learn what philosophers have said and often find we agree). **(C) The scope restriction:** Acknowledge that intuition-heavy philosophy (phenomenology, consciousness studies) may present harder cases, but the paper's argument applies to the significant portion of philosophy that works primarily through argument and counterexample. **(D) The Machery move (judo):** Machery's own work suggests intuitions are unreliable, culturally variable, and epistemically suspect. If so, a philosophy that relies less on intuitions and more on explicit argument might actually be _better_. LLMs' lack of intuitions could be an advantage. **My inclination:** (A) and (B) work well together. The textual-function response handles the methodological point; the repository response addresses the experiential dimension. (D) is interesting but changes the paper's dialectical stance — currently the paper is neutral on whether intuitions are good evidence, just arguing that whatever the standards are, LLM outputs can be evaluated by them. **Suggested location:** New paragraph or paragraphs in Section 3, after the thought-experiments discussion. Alternatively, a brief new section between 3 and 4. **Connection to other issues:** This connects directly to the "repository of second-hand experience" idea (see B.1 below), which was your co-author's affirmative proposal for handling these objections. --- #### 2. The Phenomenology / Philosophy of Mind Objection **What the transcript says:** "There may be areas of philosophy in which appeal to experience, even introspection, which is not the kind of experience that is relevant to physics... especially philosophy of mind, philosophy of consciousness in which the very subject matter is something that seems to require acquaintance." Your co-author suggests you (Nick) may not care much about this because "it's more of your doing language, metaphysics, modal logic, but perhaps in some more mathematical-like philosophy." **The objection in formal terms:** Philosophy of consciousness concerns what it's like to have experiences. If LLMs have no experiences (no qualia, no phenomenal states), they lack acquaintance with the subject matter. This is different from physics, where the subject matter is external and knowable through observation. The philosophy of consciousness might require _being_ a conscious being. **Current paper status:** Partially addressed. Section 3 argues that even Mary's Room, Searle's Chinese Room, and zombies are "textual objects" — the thought experiments do their work at the level of language, not at the level of actually experiencing anything. But the objection your co-author raises is subtler: it's not that you need to experience _the specific scenario_, but that you need to be a conscious being to grasp what's at stake. **Options:** **(A) The textual-evaluation response (current position, strengthened):** Even philosophy of consciousness is evaluated textually. Jackson's "Mary" argument is assessed by whether the premises are plausible, the inference valid, and the conclusion significant. A reader who had never experienced colour could in principle assess the argument's logic. The evaluation concerns the text's properties, not the evaluator's phenomenology. **(B) The scope restriction:** Explicitly limit the paper's claim to non-phenomenological philosophy. This weakens the paper but increases defensibility. **(C) The repository response:** The philosophical corpus is saturated with descriptions of conscious experience. LLMs have access to this massive archive of phenomenological reports. They work with consciousness _as described_, which is how most philosophical reasoning about consciousness proceeds anyway — via thought experiments, not direct introspection. **(D) The parity response:** Human philosophers reasoning about zombie conceivability also lack acquaintance with zombies. We work with the concept, not the thing. Similarly, philosophy of bat-experience (Nagel) doesn't require being a bat. LLMs are in the same epistemic position as human philosophers regarding experiences they don't have. **My inclination:** (A), (C), and (D) together. The paper can acknowledge that this is a harder case while showing it doesn't escape the text-internal evaluation framework. The question is whether the LLM can produce texts that handle the arguments correctly, not whether it has the experiences. **Suggested location:** Following the intuitions discussion, or integrated with it. --- #### 3. The Aesthetics / Evaluative Philosophy Objection **What the transcript says:** "Evaluative philosophy like aesthetics... like the Einstein experience, it's very hard to make a shift. One may apply the Einstein case to Walton's influential paper on categories of art, in which he realised how important historical categories like impressionism are in our engagement with works of art... or the other more influential paper on imaginative resistance, to introduce the concept you have to feel some resistance to certain fictions." **The objection in formal terms:** Aesthetic philosophy often involves reporting aesthetic experiences. Walton's "Categories of Art" argues that the category under which you perceive a work affects your aesthetic experience of it. Gendler's "imaginative resistance" involves _feeling_ a certain reluctance to imagine certain scenarios. If LLMs don't have aesthetic experiences or feel imaginative resistance, how can they do aesthetics? **Current paper status:** Not addressed directly. Section 3 mentions Searle's Chinese Room, which is relevant (it's about understanding), but aesthetics as a domain isn't discussed. **Options:** **(A) Fold into the phenomenology response:** Aesthetics is another case where experience seems to matter, handled by the same arguments (textual evaluation, repository of descriptions). **(B) Use Walton/Gendler as worked examples:** Show concretely how even Walton's argument about categories is an _argument_, evaluated by whether it clarifies the phenomenon, handles objections, etc. The aesthetic experience data that Walton appeals to is _described_ in the text; the argument works by reasoning about those descriptions. **(C) The corpus contains aesthetic experience:** Reviews, art criticism, personal essays, diaries — the training data includes massive amounts of aesthetic response. The LLM has learned how aesthetic experiences are described and how they're deployed in arguments. **My inclination:** (B) is attractive because it would turn an objection into a worked example, showing concretely how the paper's framework handles a hard case. But it requires space. If word count is tight, (A) is fine. **Suggested location:** With the phenomenology discussion, or as a brief aside. --- #### 4. The Bayesianism Objection **What the transcript says:** "One thing I haven't done yet, as well is talk about Bayesianism. That still hasn't been quite finished off yet." **What this might mean:** There's a Bayesian framework for abduction (Lipton has a chapter on "Bayesian Abduction"). The objection might be: Bayesian belief revision requires actually _having_ and _updating_ credences. LLMs don't have beliefs in the relevant sense; they don't maintain probability distributions over propositions that they update based on evidence. If philosophical reasoning requires Bayesian updating... **Current paper status:** Not addressed. The paper discusses Lipton on loveliness/likeliness but doesn't engage with Bayesian epistemology as an objection. **Options:** **(A) Full paragraph engaging Bayesianism:** Argue that Bayesian updating is a constraint on _diachronic rationality_ (how a reasoner should change beliefs over time), not on _synchronic text quality_ (whether a text exhibits good arguments). The paper focuses on the latter. **(B) Footnote dismissal:** Note that Bayesian requirements concern reasoners, not texts; whether the LLM updates credences is irrelevant to whether its output handles objections well. **(C) Defer to empirical research:** Note that some researchers are investigating whether LLMs do something like belief updating, but this is beside the point for text-internal evaluation. **My inclination:** (B) — a footnote is probably sufficient unless you expect serious pushback from Bayesian epistemologists. The paper's argument is about text evaluation, and Bayesianism is primarily about reasoning processes. **Suggested location:** Footnote in Section 2 or Section 3. --- ### B. Positive Additions the Transcript Suggests #### 1. The "Repository of Second-Hand Experience" Framing **What the transcript says:** Your co-author proposes thinking of the data set "not only as a repository of concepts and arguments but also as a repository of experience, second-hand experience." You respond: "a repository of experiences is really nice way of thinking about it actually." **Why this matters:** This directly addresses the intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics objections. The corpus isn't just arguments; it's an archive of human experience — what philosophers have reported about seeing, feeling, remembering, imagining. The LLM's access to experience is mediated by text, but much philosophical reasoning about experience is also mediated by text (thought experiments, case descriptions, introspective reports). **Development:** This is a genuine contribution to the dialectic. The objector says: LLMs lack experience, so they can't do phenomenological philosophy. The response: they have _second-hand_ experience — access to an enormous corpus of experience descriptions. This is actually how much philosophy of mind proceeds. We don't each introspect fresh about zombies; we engage with Chalmers's description, Jackson's description, etc. The phrase "second-hand experience" is apt because it parallels "second-hand knowledge" or "second-hand accounts" — epistemically mediated but still useful. **Risks:** Someone might object: second-hand experience isn't real experience. You can't understand what red looks like from descriptions any more than Mary could. But the counter is: we're not asking whether LLMs understand what red looks like. We're asking whether they can produce texts that handle arguments about colour experience correctly. Those are different questions. **Suggested formulation (sketch):** > The philosophical corpus contains more than arguments. It records experiences: what philosophers have reported about seeing, feeling, remembering, imagining. An LLM trained on this material has access not to experiences themselves but to how experiences have been described — second-hand acquaintance with the phenomenal. This may seem inadequate, but consider: philosophy of mind is not primarily conducted through fresh introspection. It works with cases, distinctions, and arguments that are textual. When we engage with Mary's Room, we engage with Jackson's description, not with an actual colourless room. The LLM's epistemic position mirrors normal philosophical practice. **Suggested location:** Section 3, integrated with the thought-experiments discussion, or as a new subsection addressing experience-based objections. --- #### 2. Section 4: The Demonstration Question **What the transcript says:** "Someone's going to say, okay, in that case, prove it. Show us an LLM doing good philosophy." Nick identifies two approaches: actual demonstration, or discussion of prompting techniques. The "self-proving" angle is mentioned (if the paper is good and involved LLM collaboration, that's a demonstration). **Current paper status:** Section 4 is planned but not written. The current draft ends at Section 3. **What Section 4 needs to do:** - Address the demand for demonstration head-on - Offer either actual examples or methodology for producing them - Possibly acknowledge the paper's own LLM involvement - Pay off the Hitchhiker's Guide setup **Options for structure:** **(A) Methodology focus:** Discuss what kinds of prompts produce good philosophical output. Introduce the taxonomy from the transcript: - One-shot vs. iterative - Problem-oriented vs. solution-oriented - Good continuation (shallow sense: answer continues question; deep sense: prompt gestures toward solution, continuation develops it) **(B) Demonstration focus:** Include an actual LLM-generated philosophical argument for the reader to evaluate. Risks: might feel gimmicky; might backfire if the reader doesn't find it good. **(C) Self-referential acknowledgment:** Note that this paper involved LLM collaboration (presumably true), so readers can evaluate it directly. Risks: some might see this as evading the demand (the human is still heavily involved). **(D) Theoretical response:** Argue that the theoretical case stands independently of demonstration. Whether LLMs _have_ produced good philosophy is an empirical matter; the paper establishes that they _could_ in principle. **My inclination:** A combination of (A), (C), and possibly (D). The methodology discussion is genuinely interesting and connects to the semiotic physics / good continuation ideas. The self-referential acknowledgment is elegant (it was in an earlier draft, per the transcript). The theoretical response is a fallback if demonstration proves difficult. **Connection to Hitchhiker's Guide:** The opening joke is about Deep Thought giving an unhelpful answer ("42") because the question was wrong. A payoff could be: the way to get good philosophical output is to ask the right _kind_ of question. Not "solve the mind-body problem" but something more structured — a prompt whose good continuation is itself good philosophy. This ties prompting methodology to the opening setup. Suggested ending of Section 4: > The lesson of Deep Thought is not that machines cannot answer philosophical questions but that questions must be well-posed. "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" elicits "42"; a structured inquiry elicits structured reasoning. The art of prompting is the art of writing text whose good continuation exhibits philosophical virtue. (That's just a sketch — it would need to fit Nick's voice properly.) --- #### 3. The Collaboration Continuum **What the transcript says:** "'Can do philosophy' means two things: can do philosophy in collaboration with human philosophers, or can do philosophy on their own." Also: "the less interesting the claim becomes the further along you get towards the prompter having to do all the work." **The issue:** If the claim is merely "LLMs can produce philosophy with heavy human guidance," that's weaker than "LLMs can do philosophy autonomously." But "autonomously" is probably false or at least unverifiable with current systems. The paper needs to clarify its claim. **Options:** **(A) Define the scope explicitly:** The paper argues that LLM outputs _can_ meet philosophical standards, not that LLMs _do_ produce philosophy independently. Collaboration is the normal case; that doesn't undermine the claim. **(B) The spectrum observation:** Philosophical production lies on a spectrum from fully autonomous to heavily guided. Interesting philosophy probably requires some collaboration currently. The paper's argument is that evaluation concerns the output, wherever it lies on this spectrum. **(C) The irrelevance move:** For text-internal evaluation, it doesn't matter whether the human or the LLM "did" the philosophy. We evaluate the text. Collaboration is irrelevant to that evaluation. **My inclination:** (B) and (C) together. Acknowledge the spectrum, then note that it doesn't affect the paper's central argument about evaluation. This defuses the worry that the paper is making an overblown claim about LLM autonomy. **Suggested location:** Section 4, probably after the prompting discussion. --- ### C. Structural / Tonal Adjustments #### 1. "Too Much Emphasis on Process" in Section 2 **What the transcript says:** Your co-author notes it's "again, a problem with the process... putting too much emphasis on the process." **The issue:** The paper argues that process is evaluatively irrelevant. But Section 2 spends considerable time explaining LLM mechanisms (zeroth-order abduction, stochastic generation, etc.). There's a tension between the thesis ("process doesn't matter for evaluation") and the exposition ("here's a detailed account of the process"). **Options:** **(A) Trim:** Reduce the mechanical explanation, keeping only what's necessary to understand Floridi's objection. **(B) Reframe:** Add a meta-statement acknowledging that the mechanical description is what _critics_ focus on, but evaluation concerns something else. "We describe these mechanisms not because they are evaluatively relevant, but because critics have claimed they preclude philosophical output." **(C) Structural reorganisation:** Move the mechanical explanation into a brief subsection or series of paragraphs clearly marked as "the critic's picture," then respond. **My inclination:** (B) is the lightest touch and probably sufficient. The paper already makes clear that process is irrelevant to evaluation; a brief meta-statement could reinforce this. **Suggested addition (sketch, to go early in Section 2):** > We describe these mechanisms in some detail not because they bear on evaluation — they do not — but because critics have argued that they preclude genuine philosophical output. The response to such arguments requires understanding what they claim about the process. --- #### 2. Scope: All Philosophy or Certain Domains? **What the transcript says:** Your co-author suggests the argument may "apply only to certain areas of philosophy" — the more "mathematical-like" domains (language, metaphysics, modal logic) rather than phenomenology or consciousness studies. **The issue:** The Introduction currently takes a text-focused conception and applies it broadly. But if the objections from intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics are serious, a scope restriction might be prudent. **Options:** **(A) No restriction:** The paper's argument applies to all philosophy conducted textually. Even philosophy of consciousness produces texts that can be evaluated. **(B) Soft restriction:** Acknowledge that some domains present harder cases, but argue the framework still applies (see the phenomenology response above). **(C) Hard restriction:** Explicitly limit the claim to "analytic philosophy of the argument-and-counterexample variety." This is weaker but more defensible. **My inclination:** (B). The soft restriction acknowledges legitimate concerns without abandoning the interesting claim. Hard restriction makes the paper feel narrow. **Suggested location:** Possibly in the Introduction, with elaboration in Section 3. --- #### 3. The Einstein/Zahavy Explanation **What the transcript says:** Your co-author says the Einstein equivalence principle is "already in that zombie paper" (meaning Zahavy's paper), so it doesn't need extensive explanation. **Current status:** Section 2 has a paragraph explaining how Einstein imagined the falling elevator and abduced the equivalence principle. This is appropriately concise. **Options:** **(A) Keep as is:** The explanation is necessary because readers may not have read Zahavy. **(B) Add direct Zahavy quote:** Strengthen by quoting Zahavy's own description of the Einstein case. **(C) Trim further:** If space is tight, a sentence referencing Zahavy could replace the paragraph. **My inclination:** (A). The explanation is well-done and self-contained. Adding a quote might strengthen it, but isn't necessary. --- ### D. Connections and Dependencies I'm noting (not ranking) how these issues relate: - The **intuitions objection** (A.1) and the **repository of second-hand experience** (B.1) are directly connected. The repository idea is a response to the intuitions worry. - The **phenomenology objection** (A.2) and the **aesthetics objection** (A.3) are variants of the same concern (experience-dependence). They can be addressed together using the repository framing. - **Section 4** (B.2) is downstream of Sections 0-3 and requires them as groundwork. - The **collaboration continuum** (B.3) fits naturally with the **prompting taxonomy** in Section 4. - The **process emphasis** adjustment (C.1) is relatively independent and can be done without affecting other changes. - The **scope question** (C.2) affects how the intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics responses are framed. If you restrict scope, those objections are acknowledged as limitations rather than answered. --- ### E. Suggested Workflow I'm not telling you what to do, but noting one possible order that respects dependencies: 1. Decide on scope (C.2): will you answer the phenomenology/aesthetics/intuitions objections fully, or acknowledge them as limiting the claim? 2. Based on that, write the intuitions/phenomenology response (A.1, A.2), incorporating the "repository of second-hand experience" framing (B.1). 3. Add the meta-statement about process (C.1) to Section 2. 4. Add a Bayesianism footnote (A.4) if desired. 5. Write Section 4 with prompting taxonomy, collaboration spectrum, and Hitchhiker's payoff (B.2, B.3). --- ### F. Summary List For easy reference, here's everything identified: **Objections to address:** 1. Intuitions objection (Machery) 2. Phenomenology / philosophy of mind objection 3. Aesthetics / evaluative philosophy objection 4. Bayesianism objection (minor) **Positive additions:** 5. Repository of second-hand experience (new framing) 6. Section 4: demonstration, prompting, good continuation, Hitchhiker's payoff 7. Collaboration continuum discussion **Structural adjustments:** 8. Meta-statement about process emphasis in Section 2 9. Scope clarification (all philosophy vs. certain domains) 10. Einstein/Zahavy explanation (probably fine as is) --- _Con questa analisi abbiamo setacciato la trascrizione cercando ogni filo da sviluppare — ora resta da decidere quali tessere insieme nel tessuto finale._ * Sautéed for 6m 12s /contemplate "My inclination: (A) and (B) work well together. The textual- function response handles the methodological point; the repository response addresses the experiential dimension. (D) is interesting but changes the paper's dialectical stance - currently the paper is neutral on whether intuitions are good evidence, just arguing that whatever the standards are, LLM outputs can be evaluated by them."yeah, this seems good. Please implement these changes on note. "Even philosophy of consciousness" don't put things in terms of philosophy of consciousness at all in this paper, it's needless jargon, okay The whole point of these responses Okay, the thing about the intuition one, so the problem before, and the thing about this, the phenomenology problem, is they are very similar in structure as counter arguments, right? Neither of them are going the the Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty route. by saying that just what philosophy is is impossible to do with an an llm. Rather they are saying that LLMs have some Something lacking, some lack of some sort, which human subjects have, which LLMs do not. One possibility, one thing you could say about LLMs is they don't have intuitions. Okay. The other thing you could say about LLMs is they don't have first-person phenomenology. This is the Zahavi point, I think. Okay um but yeah, they're both playing the same role. They say philosophy needs thing X and LLM does not have thing X. Okay, the response to both As I said before, I think your response to the intuition thing is good that you have a mixture of your A and B options. With this one though, with number two, the phenomenology philosophy of mind objection I mean, I think it's probably the same sort of answer both times, which is we're not going to try and make a knock down counter argument which shows this is completely wrong. Okay, so that's something to do with the scope restriction. But at the same time, It's the repository response, right? Okay, I'm not quite sure you understand the issue. But yeah, the pro surely the repository of phenomenological experiences is even more is so that's the one that's really doing the job for problem number two, the phenomenology, right? Because you have this repository of people describing their experiences, which is in the training data. Okay, and we could use that instead of having actual phenomenological experience. This is an easier problem to solve, I think, than the intuition one. Okay, because the intuition one, maybe the respo repository will work or the text function will work, but yeah, I don't know. Moving on to number three, the Aesthetic Yeah, this is the same thing as well. It's not a constitutive problem that LLMs doing philosophy, according to this objection, but it's again something that these systems. lack, then she and subjects do not. I feel like one way of thinking about section three before we redraft is the intuition problem, the aesthetics problem, and the phenomenological experience problem, they're all different sides of the same coin. So this objection to our view needs to be distilled and then these three examples need to be given succinctly just to demonstrate the different flavors of this particular counter objection to us. Okay, then our response to this problem can also be distilled. Okay. By the way, maybe this needs means there has to be problems in section changes in section two as well as section three. But yeah, that also means in section three our response can be distilled, and our response can be to concede that potentially some aspects of philosophy um are ruled out by LLMs because stuff is missing, but then also mention this huge Repository of information. Okay, repository of phenomenological descriptions, repository of people describing their intuitions, repository of people describing aesthetic experiences. Okay, so yeah, with the The way I see section two is it's giving us two distinct problems LLMs doing philosophy, both of them rooted in issues with abduction and LLMs The one we're looking at now, although the Zahavi frames his problem in terms of abduction, we can actually make his objection broader and stronger just by putting it in the terms that I have done. which is LLMs as systems have some sort of an absence which prevents them from doing some or all types of philosophy. Okay, and what we've been talking about here with intuition, phenomenology and aesthetics is that. Let's not do the uh Baynesianism stuff now. Okay, we can update that on another day. Let's move on to your positive additions that you got from the transcript. Yes, so the repository idea. It's a the best way of phrasing it is A repository of descriptions of experience. Okay, but as I mentioned just a moment ago, you can also say it's a repository of descriptions of intuitive experience or phenomenological experience or aesthetic experience. Okay? The the argument works all three ways. So obviously don't waste words by going through the same argument three times, of course. Moving on to section four, the demonstration question. Let's not worry about that just yet. Number three, the collaboration continuum. No, let's not worry about that yet. Um moving on to your C structural tonal adjustments. You say too much emphasis on process. I think you've misunderstood the transcription here. I don't think that he was criticizing the paper, I think he was criticizing or describing another person's view. So I think you've completely misunderstood that one. Please double check though. Scope, I think I've kind of already answered that. Number three, the Einsteins are Havi explanation. I don't understand what you're trying to say there. Okay, looking at D connections and dependencies. Okay, the intuition intuitions objection in the repository of second-hand experience. No, you're getting this wrong here. Okay, so looking at those two bullet points in your connections and dependencies. The first thing to say is, as I've mentioned, intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics are all variants of the same problem that could be directed at the view we're putting out here. And all three could to some degree be resolved. by the appeal LLMs training data being a repository of second-hand experience. And yeah, so I would like you to update your recommendations as to what to change based on my responses here. Continue just to talk to me in the chat. If you give me a good final answer i will ask oyu to update the note but not before make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. Right, let me work through Nick's corrections carefully and update my understanding. **First correction: The structure of the objection** Nick is saying that intuitions, phenomenology, and aesthetics are all _variants of the same objection_, not three separate objections. The objection has a single structure: > "Philosophy needs X. LLMs lack X. Therefore LLMs cannot do (some/all) philosophy." Where X can be instantiated as: - Intuitions - First-person phenomenological experience - Aesthetic experience This is different from the constitutive objections (Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Hadot) which say that philosophy _just is_ something LLMs cannot do by nature. Those are handled in the Introduction already. This new objection is about a _deficit_ — something missing from LLMs that humans have. So the paper needs to: 1. Present this deficit objection as a single unified objection 2. Give the three flavours (intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics) succinctly as examples of what the deficit might be 3. Offer a unified response **Second correction: The response** Nick says the response is: 1. A scope concession — maybe some aspects of philosophy are ruled out 2. The repository response — LLMs have access to descriptions of experiences (intuitive, phenomenological, aesthetic) in the training data And crucially: the repository response does the same work for all three flavours. Don't repeat the argument three times. Nick also says the phenomenology case is _easier_ than the intuitions case, because the repository of phenomenological descriptions is clearly relevant — people describe their experiences all the time. For intuitions, the repository might work but it's less obvious. **Third correction: Don't say "philosophy of consciousness"** Nick says this is needless jargon. Just talk about phenomenology or first-person experience without making it about a subdiscipline. **Fourth correction: Section structure** Nick says this might require changes to Section 2 as well as Section 3. He's suggesting that the current Section 2 (Floridi and Zahavy) presents two problems rooted in abduction issues. But Zahavy's objection can be made broader and stronger by framing it as the deficit objection. So maybe: - Section 2 presents Floridi (zeroth-order abduction, no evaluation) - Section 2 also presents Zahavy, but reframed: not just about embodied simulation for physics, but about LLMs lacking something that philosophy requires Or perhaps: - Section 2 presents both Floridi and Zahavy as abduction-based objections - Section 3 responds to Floridi - A new section (or part of Section 3) introduces and responds to the deficit objection (intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics) I need to think about where this fits structurally... Actually, looking at the current draft: - Section 0: Introduction - Section 1: Philosophy in the Text (the text IS the work) - Section 2: LLMs and Abduction (Floridi + Zahavy) - Section 3: Thought Experiments and Armchair Abduction (response: philosophy is textual) The deficit objection (intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics) is currently not in the draft at all. It's a new objection that emerged from the transcript discussion. The question is where to put it. Options: A) Add it to Section 2 as a third objection (alongside Floridi and Zahavy) B) Add it to Section 3 as something the response needs to address C) Create a new section for it Nick says "maybe this means there have to be changes in section two as well as section three." That suggests either (A) or a combination where the objection is introduced in Section 2 and responded to in Section 3. But wait — Nick also says Zahavy's objection can be "made broader and stronger by putting it in the terms that I have done." So maybe the move is: - Keep Zahavy in Section 2 but reframe it as a deficit objection (LLMs lack embodied simulation / grounded concepts) - Then in Section 3, broaden the deficit objection: it's not just about embodied simulation, it's about any experiential capacity (intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics) - Respond with the repository argument Let me think about this more carefully... Zahavy's original objection is about scientific invention requiring the E→A Jump — from sensory experience to formal axioms. The paper currently responds: philosophical thought experiments are textual, not sensory; they don't require the E→A Jump. But Nick is saying: Zahavy's objection can be strengthened. Even if philosophy doesn't require leaps from sensation to axioms, it might require _some_ experiential capacity that LLMs lack. Intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic experience. So the deficit objection is a _generalization_ of Zahavy's objection. Zahavy said: LLMs lack sensory grounding. The generalized version says: LLMs lack [intuitions / phenomenological experience / aesthetic experience]. This suggests the structure might be: **Section 2:** - Floridi: LLMs don't evaluate, they just generate plausible continuations - Zahavy: LLMs lack grounded concepts / can't make the E→A Jump **Section 3:** - Response to Floridi: philosophical evaluation concerns the output, not the process - Response to Zahavy's specific point: philosophical thought experiments are textual, not sensory - But: Zahavy's objection generalizes. Even if philosophy doesn't require E→A Jumps, it might require experiential capacities LLMs lack. Three flavours: intuitions, phenomenological experience, aesthetic experience. - Response to the generalized deficit objection: (1) scope concession — maybe some philosophy is affected; (2) repository response — LLMs have access to descriptions of experiences in the corpus Actually, this might work better if the generalized deficit objection is introduced at the _end_ of Section 2, as a strengthening of Zahavy, and then responded to at the end of Section 3. Or: keep Section 2 as is (Floridi + Zahavy), and in Section 3, after responding to the abduction objections, note that there's a broader version of Zahavy's objection (the deficit objection) and respond to it. I think the latter is cleaner. The paper already responds to Zahavy's specific point about embodied simulation. Then it can note: "But one might press a broader version of this objection..." and introduce the deficit objection, then respond. **Fifth correction: I misread the transcript on "process emphasis"** Nick says I misunderstood. Let me go back to the transcript: > "Hey, what's the difference? So it seems that Florida. It's again, a problem with the process uh is putting too much emphasis on the process." Hmm. Nick says the co-author was "criticizing or describing another person's view," not criticizing the paper. Let me re-read... "So it seems that Floridi... it's again, a problem with the process... putting too much emphasis on the process." Ah, I see. The co-author is saying that _Floridi's_ objection puts too much emphasis on the process. Floridi focuses on the LLM's generation mechanism (zeroth-order abduction, stochastic prediction), but the paper's response is that process is irrelevant to evaluation. So the co-author is describing _Floridi's_ emphasis on process as the problem with Floridi's view, not saying the paper over-emphasizes process. That makes more sense. The paper doesn't need to trim its discussion of process; it needs to present Floridi's process-focus and then argue that process is evaluatively irrelevant. Which it already does. So strike my C.1 recommendation. **Sixth correction: Einstein/Zahavy explanation** Nick says he doesn't understand what I was trying to say. Let me clarify what I meant: The transcript says: "The Einstein principle of equivalence maybe, but that's all. I think it's already that zombie paper, so it's not a problem for us to explain the principle." I interpreted this as: Zahavy's paper already explains the Einstein equivalence principle, so the paper doesn't need to explain it in detail. I then noted that the paper currently does explain it briefly, and that's probably fine. The suggestion was: keep the current explanation, or optionally add a direct quote from Zahavy. But this is a minor point. If Nick doesn't think it needs attention, leave it. **Seventh correction: Connections and dependencies** Nick says I was getting it wrong. He's right — I was treating intuitions, phenomenology, and aesthetics as separate objections that happen to be related. Nick is saying they're all instantiations of the same objection-structure, and the repository response addresses all three at once. So the updated picture: **The Deficit Objection (singular):** - Structure: Philosophy needs X, LLMs lack X - Instantiations: X = intuitions, X = phenomenological experience, X = aesthetic experience **The Response (singular):** - Scope concession: maybe some philosophy is affected - Repository response: LLMs have access to descriptions of [intuitive / phenomenological / aesthetic] experience in the training data The repository response is _one_ argument that works for all three instantiations. Don't repeat it three times. **Eighth point: Phrasing** Nick says the best phrasing is "a repository of descriptions of experience." The argument can then be applied to different kinds of experience without repeating the whole thing. **Ninth point: Section 4 and collaboration continuum** Nick says don't worry about these yet. Park them for now. **Tenth point: Bayesianism** Nick says don't worry about this now. Park it. --- Okay, let me now think about how this all fits together and what the updated recommendations should be. **The single new objection to add:** The Deficit Objection: - Philosophy requires certain experiential capacities - LLMs lack these capacities - Therefore LLMs cannot do (some/all) philosophy Three flavours (examples, not separate arguments): 1. Intuitions — philosophy appeals to intuitions as evidence; if LLMs don't have intuitions, they can't have this evidence 2. Phenomenological experience — philosophy of [certain topics] concerns what experience is like; if LLMs have no experiences, they can't engage properly 3. Aesthetic experience — aesthetics involves judgments based on aesthetic response; if LLMs have no aesthetic responses... **The response:** Two parts: 1. Scope concession — concede that some aspects of philosophy _might_ be affected. Don't claim a knockdown argument. Be measured. 2. Repository response — LLMs have access to a vast corpus of descriptions of experience. People describing their intuitions, their phenomenal states, their aesthetic responses. This is "second-hand experience" — not the experiences themselves, but access to how they've been described. Philosophy typically proceeds by reasoning about cases and descriptions anyway, not by fresh introspection. The response doesn't need to fully resolve the worry. It shows that LLMs have more resources than the objector might assume, and that the gap between LLMs and human philosophers is smaller than it first appears. **Where does this go in the paper?** Option 1: Add the deficit objection to Section 2 (as a third objection after Floridi and Zahavy), then respond in Section 3. Option 2: Keep Section 2 as is. In Section 3, after responding to Floridi and Zahavy, introduce the deficit objection as a broader version of Zahavy's point ("But one might press a more general concern..."), then respond. Option 3: Integrate it with the Zahavy discussion. Reframe Zahavy as an instance of the deficit objection, then generalize and respond. Nick's comment — "maybe this means there have to be changes in section two as well as section three" — suggests Option 1 or Option 3. Let me think about which is cleanest... Currently: - Section 2 presents Floridi (zeroth-order abduction) and Zahavy (embodied simulation / E→A Jump) - Section 3 responds: philosophy is textual, thought experiments are textual objects, the corpus encodes evaluative standards If we add the deficit objection as a third objection in Section 2, then Section 3 needs to respond to it as well. But actually, the deficit objection _overlaps_ with Zahavy's point. Zahavy says LLMs lack grounded concepts / sensory simulation. The deficit objection says LLMs lack experiential capacities. These are related — Zahavy is giving one instance of the deficit. So maybe the cleanest structure is: **Section 2:** - Floridi: zeroth-order abduction, no evaluation - Zahavy: E→A Jump, embodied simulation - Broaden Zahavy: The deeper issue is that LLMs might lack experiential capacities philosophy requires. Not just sensory grounding for physics, but intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic response. [Give the three flavours briefly here as examples of what might be missing.] **Section 3:** - Response to Floridi: evaluation concerns the output, not the process - Response to Zahavy's specific point: philosophical thought experiments are textual, not sensory - Response to the broader deficit objection: (1) scope concession; (2) repository response — LLMs have access to descriptions of experience This way, the deficit objection is introduced in Section 2 as a generalization of Zahavy, and responded to in Section 3. It's one objection with three flavours, and one response with two parts. Actually, let me reconsider. The current Section 2 ends with: > Zahavy limits this argument explicitly: "this proposal is specifically tailored to the physical sciences, where the object of study is external material reality". Whether philosophy makes similar demands is a question he does not address. I will argue in the next section that it does not — that philosophical abduction, as Williamson characterises it, requires conceptual reconfiguration of textual materials rather than leaps from bodily sensation to formal axioms. If this is correct, the gap that Zahavy identifies in scientific invention does not appear in the philosophical case. So the current structure is: Zahavy limits his claim to physics; I'll argue philosophy doesn't require the same thing. The deficit objection is a _generalization_ of Zahavy's point that _does_ apply to philosophy. The response can then be: even this generalized version doesn't fully apply, because of the repository of descriptions. Hmm, but where exactly to introduce the generalization? Maybe: - Keep Section 2 as is (it presents Floridi and Zahavy as abduction-based objections) - In Section 3, after responding to Zahavy's specific point (thought experiments are textual), note: "But one might generalize Zahavy's concern. Even if philosophy doesn't require leaps from sensation to formal axioms, it might require experiential capacities LLMs lack: intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic response." - Then give the response: scope concession + repository This keeps Section 2 focused on the abduction framing, and Section 3 handles both the specific responses and the broader deficit worry. Actually, this might work better. Section 2 sets up two objections rooted in abduction/reasoning. Section 3 responds and then addresses a broader version of the concern. Let me think about this more... Nick says: "The way I see section two is it's giving us two distinct problems for LLMs doing philosophy, both of them rooted in issues with abduction and LLMs. The one we're looking at now, although Zahavy frames his problem in terms of abduction, we can actually make his objection broader and stronger just by putting it in the terms that I have done." So Nick is seeing Section 2 as giving two abduction-based problems. And the deficit objection (intuitions/phenomenology/aesthetics) is a _broadening_ of Zahavy's objection. Where should this broadening happen? Nick says "maybe this means there have to be changes in section two as well as section three." One interpretation: Add the broadening to Section 2 (after presenting Zahavy, note that this can be generalized), then respond in Section 3. Another interpretation: Zahavy's objection in Section 2 is already broad enough to gesture at the deficit; Section 3 makes the generalization explicit and responds. I think either could work. Let me sketch both: **Option A: Add broadening to Section 2** End of Section 2 currently: > Zahavy limits this argument explicitly... I will argue in the next section that it does not... Revised end of Section 2: > Zahavy limits this argument explicitly to physics. But one might press a broader version of the concern. Even if philosophy doesn't require leaps from sensation to axioms, it might require experiential capacities LLMs lack — intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic response. I address this broader concern in the next section. Then Section 3 responds to both Zahavy's specific point and the generalized deficit objection. **Option B: Keep Section 2 as is, add broadening to Section 3** Section 3 currently responds to Zahavy: thought experiments are textual, not sensory. After this response, add: > But one might generalise Zahavy's concern. Even if philosophy doesn't require sensory simulation, it might require other experiential capacities LLMs lack. Consider three possibilities. [Give intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics briefly.] This broader deficit objection cannot be dismissed by noting that thought experiments are textual. It requires a different response. > [Then give the response: scope concession + repository.] I think Option B is cleaner because it keeps Section 2 focused on the two abduction-based objections as they're presented in the literature (Floridi, Zahavy), and Section 3 does the work of responding and generalizing. But Nick did say changes might be needed in Section 2 as well... Actually, I think the key question is: is the deficit objection a new objection, or is it a generalization of Zahavy's objection? Nick says: "we can actually make his objection broader and stronger." So it's a _generalization_ of Zahavy. Zahavy says: LLMs lack grounded concepts / sensory simulation, which blocks scientific invention. The generalized version says: LLMs lack experiential capacities (of various kinds), which might block philosophy. If it's a generalization of Zahavy, then it makes sense to introduce it after presenting Zahavy's objection (either at the end of Section 2 or at the start of Section 3's response to Zahavy). I'll suggest: introduce the generalized deficit objection at the end of Section 2, as a broadening of Zahavy, then respond fully in Section 3. --- Now let me think about the _content_ of the response more carefully. **The repository response:** The training corpus contains not just arguments and concepts, but descriptions of experiences. Philosophers have written extensively about what experiences are like — in phenomenological reports, in appeals to intuition, in aesthetic criticism. This is "second-hand experience": not the experiences themselves, but access to how they've been described. How does this help? Two ways: 1. **For intuitions:** Philosophical texts are full of intuition-reports. "Intuitively, Gettier cases aren't knowledge." The LLM has learned from millions of such statements what is considered intuitive, when to appeal to intuitions, how they function in arguments. It can deploy intuition-talk correctly without "having" intuitions. 2. **For phenomenology:** The corpus contains vast descriptions of what experiences are like. When philosophers discuss Mary's Room, they describe what learning what red looks like might involve. The LLM has access to these descriptions. Philosophy of [whatever requires phenomenology] proceeds largely by reasoning about described cases, not by fresh introspection. 3. **For aesthetics:** Art criticism, diaries, autobiographies — the corpus includes extensive aesthetic response. The LLM has learned how aesthetic experiences are described and how they function in aesthetic judgments. The general point: philosophy typically works with _described_ experiences, not raw experiences. Thought experiments are scenarios we reason about, not scenarios we live through. The LLM's epistemic position is analogous to the normal epistemic position of a philosopher engaging with cases they haven't personally experienced. **The scope concession:** Concede that _some_ philosophy might be affected. Don't claim a knockdown argument. Be measured. What exactly to concede? Options: (a) Concede that philosophy requiring _novel_ intuitions / experiences might be harder. The repository contains existing descriptions; for truly novel cases, the LLM might not have the right resources. (b) Concede that philosophy where first-person authority matters (e.g., "What is it like for _me_ to see red?") might be beyond LLMs. They can reason about what experiences are like _in general_, but not about their own experiences. (c) Concede that the argument doesn't establish that LLMs are _just as good_ as humans at this kind of philosophy, only that they have more resources than the objector assumes. (d) Concede nothing specific, just note that the argument is partial: "This does not fully resolve the concern, but it shows that LLMs have more resources than the objection assumes." Nick says: "concede that potentially some aspects of philosophy are ruled out by LLMs because stuff is missing." That suggests (a) or (b) — there might be aspects of philosophy where the deficit really does matter. The response shows that the gap is smaller than it seems, not that there's no gap. I think the concession should be vague rather than specific. Don't name a particular subdomain as off-limits. Just acknowledge that the repository response is partial and the worry might have some purchase in some cases. --- Let me also think about the phrasing of "repository of descriptions of experience." Nick's phrasing: "a repository of descriptions of experience." This is better than "second-hand experience" because: - "Second-hand experience" might suggest that LLMs have _some kind of_ experience, just not first-hand. But we're not committed to LLMs having experiences at all. - "Descriptions of experience" makes clear what's actually in the corpus: text describing what experiences are like. The argument structure: 1. LLMs lack experiential capacities (intuitions / phenomenology / aesthetics) 2. But: LLMs have access to descriptions of experiences in the training corpus 3. Philosophy typically reasons about described cases, not raw experiences 4. So: LLMs have resources to engage with philosophy that appeals to experience --- Now let me think about where exactly the three flavours (intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics) get introduced. The deficit objection is one objection with three flavours. The paper should: - Introduce the general structure of the deficit objection - Give the three flavours as examples (succinctly — don't belabour each one) - Respond with the repository argument (once, not three times) Suggested structure: > [Transitional sentence from Zahavy response] > > But one might press a more general concern. Even if philosophical thought experiments do not require sensory simulation, they might require experiential capacities LLMs lack. Consider three possibilities. > > First, intuitions. Philosophical arguments often appeal to intuitions as evidence. If LLMs cannot have intuitions — if they lack the relevant kind of intellectual seeming — then their intuition-talk is hollow. > > Second, phenomenological acquaintance. Some philosophy concerns what experience is like. If LLMs have no experiences, they lack acquaintance with the subject matter. > > Third, aesthetic response. Aesthetics involves judgments grounded in aesthetic experience. If LLMs have no aesthetic responses, how can they make aesthetic judgments? > > These are not constitutive objections — they do not claim that philosophy just is something LLMs cannot do. They claim that LLMs lack something philosophy requires. > > [Then the response:] > > I want to offer a partial response. The philosophical corpus contains not only arguments but descriptions of experiences. Phenomenological reports, intuition-claims, aesthetic criticism — these are abundant in the training data. An LLM has access to how experiences have been described, even if it has no experiences of its own. This is not the same as having experiences, but it may be enough for much philosophical work. > > [Explain how philosophy typically works with described cases] > > [Scope concession:] > > This does not fully dissolve the concern. There may be aspects of philosophy where first-person experiential capacities genuinely matter and descriptions are not sufficient. But the gap between LLMs and human philosophers is smaller than the deficit objection suggests. Something like that. The three flavours are given succinctly; the response is given once; the concession is measured. --- Let me also think about the relationship between the deficit objection and the earlier objections (Floridi, Zahavy's specific point). The paper now addresses three distinct concerns: 1. Floridi: LLMs don't evaluate, they just generate plausible continuations. 2. Zahavy: LLMs can't make the E→A Jump (embodied simulation). 3. Deficit objection: LLMs lack experiential capacities (intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics). The responses: 1. To Floridi: Evaluation concerns the output, not the process. The corpus encodes evaluative standards. 2. To Zahavy's specific point: Philosophical thought experiments are textual, not sensory. They don't require the E→A Jump. 3. To the deficit objection: LLMs have access to descriptions of experiences. Philosophy works with described cases. The gap is smaller than it seems. These responses are distinct but related. The thread running through them is: what matters for philosophy is in the text, and LLMs have access to the text. --- Okay, I think I have a clear enough picture now. Let me formulate the updated recommendations. **Summary of corrections:** 1. Intuitions, phenomenology, and aesthetics are three flavours of ONE objection (the deficit objection), not three separate objections. 2. The response to the deficit objection has two parts: scope concession + repository response. 3. The repository response applies to all three flavours — don't repeat it three times. 4. Phrasing: "repository of descriptions of experience." 5. Don't say "philosophy of consciousness" — avoid jargon. 6. The deficit objection is a generalization of Zahavy's point. 7. It might require changes to Section 2 (to introduce the generalization) as well as Section 3 (to respond). 8. I misread the "too much emphasis on process" comment — the co-author was describing Floridi's view, not criticizing the paper. Strike that recommendation. 9. Don't worry about Section 4 (demonstration) or collaboration continuum for now. 10. Don't worry about Bayesianism for now. --- Now, one more thing to think about: the specific changes to make. **Changes to Section 2:** The current end of Section 2 says Zahavy limits his argument to physics, and the next section will argue philosophy doesn't require the same thing. Suggested revision: After this, add a paragraph noting that Zahavy's objection can be generalized. Even if philosophy doesn't require sensory simulation, it might require experiential capacities LLMs lack. Preview the three flavours. Something like: > But Zahavy's concern might generalise. Even if philosophy does not require leaps from sensation to axioms, it might require other experiential capacities LLMs lack. Intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic response — these are frequently invoked in philosophical argument. If LLMs cannot have intuitions, cannot know what experience is like, cannot respond aesthetically, then significant parts of philosophical practice might be beyond them. I address this broader concern in the next section. **Changes to Section 3:** After responding to Zahavy's specific point (thought experiments are textual), add the response to the generalized deficit objection. This would include: - The three flavours stated succinctly - The repository response - The scope concession The three flavours should be brief (one sentence each, perhaps). The repository response can be a paragraph or two. The scope concession can be a sentence or two. --- Hmm, but there's a question about placement. The current Section 3 moves from the armchair abduction discussion to Williamson on philosophical methodology to the thought experiments discussion. Where does the deficit objection response fit? Current Section 3 structure (roughly): 1. Williamson on philosophical abduction — intrinsic virtues, textual evidence 2. The corpus is filtered for quality — papers that exhibit good philosophy survive 3. Zahavy response: philosophical thought experiments are textual (Twin Earth, Mary, Chinese Room, teleporter) 4. Novelty: conceptual innovations are reconfigurations of existing materials, not leaps from sensation to axioms 5. Lipton's levels-of-description point: the stochastic description doesn't settle the normative question The deficit objection response should probably go after (3), where the thought experiments discussion happens. That's where we've addressed Zahavy's specific point; the natural place to generalise is right after. So: after the Twin Earth / Mary / Chinese Room / teleporter passage, add: - The generalized deficit objection (intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics as examples) - The repository response - The scope concession Then continue to (4) and (5). Alternatively, put it at the very end of Section 3, as a final concern and response before concluding. But I think it fits better after the thought experiments discussion, because that's where the Zahavy response happens. --- Actually, wait. Let me re-read the current Section 3 to see how it flows... Current Section 3: 1. Opening: Williamson on philosophical abduction — theories ranked by fit with evidence and intrinsic virtues. 2. Evidence in philosophy: arguments, counterexamples, thought experiments — the accumulated textual record. 3. Mathematics analogy: armchair methodology with abduction. 4. The philosophical corpus exhibits intrinsic virtues — filtered by peer review. 5. Floridi response: "plausibility" in philosophy just is scoring well on Williamson's virtues; the corpus encodes evaluative standards. 6. Zahavy response: Thought experiments are textual, not sensory. Twin Earth, Mary, Chinese Room, teleporter — they enter the record as text. 7. Zahavy's model doesn't fit philosophy: no E→A Jump needed, philosophical novelty is conceptual reconfiguration. 8. Lipton's levels-of-description point: mechanics vs. normative evaluation. The Zahavy response is in (6) and (7). The generalized deficit objection and response should go after (7), before (8). Actually, (8) is the current ending — the Lipton point about levels of description. The generalized deficit objection and response might replace (8) as the ending, or come before (8). Let me think... The Lipton point is about distinguishing mechanical description from normative evaluation. It's a methodological point that applies to the whole argument. The deficit objection is a specific concern that needs addressing. Maybe: - After (7), introduce the generalized deficit objection - Respond with repository + scope concession - Then close with (8) — the Lipton point Or: - After (7), close with (8) — the Lipton point - Then add the generalized deficit objection and response as a coda I think the former is better. The Lipton point is a good closing because it steps back and makes a general methodological observation. So: [After paragraph on conceptual reconfiguration (7)] NEW: Generalized deficit objection (one paragraph) NEW: Repository response (one-two paragraphs) NEW: Scope concession (one paragraph or part of a paragraph) THEN: Lipton point (8) — as the closing --- Okay, I think I have enough to formulate updated recommendations. --- ## Final Answer Based on your corrections, here is my updated understanding and revised recommendations: --- ### Revised Understanding **The Deficit Objection (singular):** You're right that intuitions, phenomenology, and aesthetics are not three separate objections but _three flavours of the same objection_. The objection has a single structure: > "Philosophy requires experiential capacity X. LLMs lack X. Therefore LLMs cannot do (some/all) philosophy." This is distinct from the _constitutive_ objections (Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Hadot) that say philosophy just _is_ something LLMs cannot do. The deficit objection concedes that philosophy is the kind of thing an LLM might in principle do, but claims LLMs are missing something required. Zahavy's objection is an instance of this: he says LLMs lack sensory grounding / embodied simulation, which blocks scientific invention. The generalized version says: even if philosophy doesn't require sensory grounding for physics, it might require experiential capacities of other kinds. The three flavours (intuitions, phenomenological acquaintance, aesthetic response) are _examples_ of what might be missing — not separate arguments requiring separate responses. **The Response (singular):** Two parts, as you said: 1. **Scope concession:** Concede that potentially some aspects of philosophy are affected — don't claim a knockdown argument, be measured. 2. **Repository response:** LLMs have access to a repository of descriptions of experience in the training corpus. People describing their intuitions, phenomenal states, aesthetic responses. Philosophy typically proceeds by reasoning about described cases (thought experiments, intuition-reports, case studies in aesthetics), not by fresh introspection. The LLM's epistemic position is analogous to the normal epistemic position of a philosopher engaging with described cases. The repository response works for all three flavours — intuitions, phenomenology, aesthetics — because the corpus contains descriptions of all three. The argument should be made once, then noted to apply across cases. **Phrasing:** "Repository of descriptions of experience" is cleaner than "second-hand experience." It can then be specified: descriptions of intuitive experience, phenomenological experience, aesthetic experience. --- ### Revised Structural --- # What's Happening *Active threads and today's activity — updated by /harvest* ## Active ## Sessions - 12:22 - "Compare frontend-slides skill with GitHub" — https://github.com/zarazhangrui/frontend-slides I once downloaded the skill f... - 13:00 - "Analyze co-author transcript for paper revisions" — Base directory for this skill: /Users/nickyoung/.claude/skills/contemplate # ... - 14:31 - "https://github.com/zarazhangrui/frontend-slides..." — https://github.com/zarazhangrui/frontend-slides I once downloaded the skill f... - 15:49 - "Analyze and augment LLM-generated presentation" — Base directory for this skill: /Users/nickyoung/.claude/skills/contemplate # ... - 15:49 - "This session is being continued from a previous..." — This session is being continued from a previous conversation that ran out of ... - 16:38 - "Analyze and augment HTML presentation slides" — Base directory for this skill: /Users/nickyoung/.claude/skills/contemplate # ... - 19:23 - "Contemplate MIDI scale converter iPad app idea" — Base directory for this skill: /Users/nickyoung/.claude/skills/contemplate # ... - 19:38 - "Create YouTube video note from URL" — ## Context - **Vault Root:** `/Users/nickyoung/My Obsidian Vault` - **Target ... - 22:17 - "Check vault and config backup status" — when was the last time my vault was backed up? what about my config files? ## Actions - 13:00 - Created [[Generating Philosophy - Transcript Review (4 Mar 2026)]] in Notes/ - 18:45 - Processed video: "Just Found The Best Humanizing Plugin So Far!" → [[Videos/Just Found The Best Humanizing Plugin So Far]] - 19:17 - Created [[Vibe Coding — Product Spec]] in Notes/ ---