# Transcript - Draft Discussion (Sections 0-3) > [!warning] Claude/Codex: SUPERSEDED > This transcript is from 20 March 2026. The discussion on 31 March 2026 ([[Transcript - Draft Discussion 31 March 2026]]) supersedes the structural and editorial proposals here. Do NOT treat the suggestions in this transcript as current plans for the paper. Consult the March 31 transcript and any decision notes tagged `#generating-philosophy` for the current state of play. This is a cleaned full transcript of a discussion between Nick and Enrico about the most recent draft of the generating philosophy paper, covering sections 0-3. `[unclear]` marks places where the source transcript was too garbled to reconstruct confidently. Related: - [[0. Introduction]] - [[1. The Challenge from Authorship]] - [[2. LLMs and Abduction]] - [[3. The challenge from experience and the challenge from connecting to the world]] ## Transcript **Nick:** The difference between the zombie case and the philosophical cases, and things like that. What we say may apply to physics too, certainly, or what he says can also apply to philosophy, but we can discuss that. **Nick:** I can stay put that way. I'm always moving around. Basically I've got to stand up, sit down, stop. Please show me one what? No, it's better now. I realized when I presented that at the workshop that it seems to me the Douglas Adams quotation is not super clear. **Nick:** The role it plays in our paper: I wonder whether we should just drop it. It's nice to keep it, but maybe we should explain it better. Unless it's all just rhetorical, in which case it's okay. It's just that the reader may expect it to have some relevance to the argument. **Enrico:** Whereas really it's just a way of introducing the idea that in 2026 humanity has reached a position in which you can actually ask machines philosophical questions. In other words, the problem there is that the question was not asked properly. **Nick:** Yeah. I think we talked about this. Did I talk to you about this? **Nick:** What would help is if we do another section about how to prompt in order to get good philosophy. **Enrico:** Exactly, exactly. That was my point. This seems to be about the importance of prompting, which is not there so far. So it makes sense to keep this if we also add a section on prompting. **Nick:** Yeah. Or we actually just move the entire argument down to that section. Move the entire example down to that section instead of having it at the beginning of the paper, where it seems to give the direction of the paper and so may look misleading. **Enrico:** We can do that. And maybe it would be a nice break after a lot of heavy philosophy. At the beginning maybe we just say something like: instead of having the quotation there, we say that whereas in science fiction you might ask an AI to do something absurd, in 2026 humanity has actually reached a position in which you can ask machines philosophical questions. **Nick:** So something like: in the science-fiction novel...? **Enrico:** Yes. Just create a rhetorical contrast between the science-fiction case and what we have now. **Nick:** Yeah, yeah. **Enrico:** And then we can take the science-fiction case again later, with more detail, when it fits better. **Nick:** Good. Yeah. **Enrico:** Then: there's a missing reference in the other updates. And "Stoljar" doesn't have a date. **Nick:** Oh yeah. **Enrico:** Page 3: "crystallographic data." Just a concern: usually "crystallographic" is not biological, so I wonder whether this is the right term. As far as I remember, crystallographic is almost the opposite of biological. **Nick:** It's the Watson-Crick example. **Enrico:** Yes, it's just whether that is the right term. Usually, as far as I remember, "crystallographic" is not biological. **Nick:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good to catch that. **Enrico:** When you introduce the dependence claim, I wonder whether maybe you need some brackets here saying "stands or not," "depends or not," since there you also stress the negative. **Nick:** Sorry, which one was it? **Enrico:** "The phenomenon depends on that," or not. **Nick:** Okay. Yep, got it. **Enrico:** Then just a few lines after: "two speakers on Twitter." As far as I remember, it's not "two speakers," it's one speaker. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** But this is the sentence: "we have some call this overfitting," and then the last sentence. To me the anaphoric reference should be clarified better. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** Otherwise it's not clear. **Nick:** Okay, yep, sorry. Yes. **Enrico:** Then here: this sentence, "a philosophical corpus is not just any body of text; it is a body of text shaped by repeated judgments about whether its arguments..." and so on. This will become clearer later, we told the peer reviewer, but at this stage I found the sentence a bit enigmatic. A reader may just say: judgment by whom? What exactly does that mean? **Nick:** Because it fits better with things that come later, is that what you're saying? **Enrico:** Yes. Because here "philosophical corpus" is already a notion that is not obvious. "Not just any body of text, but one shaped by repeated judgments..." It requires a bit more unpacking, because later it will be explained. Here it risks being obscure. **Enrico:** Also the transition is too abrupt. The first section ends, and then suddenly: "Floridi and others argue that..." But why are we going to Floridi? Maybe we can say that in the introduction, but I think it's useful also at the end of section one to have a bridge to the next section. **Nick:** Okay. **Enrico:** Then up here: there are commas in the quotation. "LLMs are the sort of thing..." LLMs will repeatedly do these things when you tell them not to. **Enrico:** Here is this sentence: "They produce one plausible continuation without weighing it against alternatives," so far so good, "and they do so without what Floridi calls an external feedback loop for posterior evaluation." That is not understandable unless we explain what "external feedback loop for posterior evaluation" means. **Nick:** I wonder whether the sentence can just do without that. **Enrico:** Exactly. Or if we want to keep it, it has to be made plainer. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** Then the part about the philosophical corpus: yes, here the previous emphasis is explained, but maybe "weak work survives" or whatever. Well, no, it's okay. Also maybe: "strong work may be overlooked," or "sometimes overlooked." Something that qualifies it slightly. **Nick:** Okay. **Enrico:** Then here at the end of page 7: "Williamson uses to have one way of characterising..." but this relies on something we have already said. So just say something like "as said above," because if it's already in the paper then it is odd to present it as something new. **Nick:** It's a sort of summary of that, yeah. **Enrico:** Yes. If it's a recap, it's okay, but we have to introduce it as a recap. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** And the same for Lipton. "Lipton distinguishes the likeliest from the loveliest," but we already have a whole section about that. So if it's a recap: "as seen above, Lipton distinguishes..." **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** A bit earlier, before the Lipton paragraph, there is the sentence: "as Walton and the others observe, familiar forms of the feasible..." [unclear] "critical questions." Again, that sentence is not clear. **Nick:** I was thinking I want to remove Walton anyway because there are too many people in this paragraph. **Enrico:** The paragraph is also very long. It's not clear what that sentence means. **Nick:** There's this bit about "likeliness" using two different senses. One is statistical likeliness, but then in Lipton's sense likeliness seems to have more to do with something like accuracy or truth-tracking. **Enrico:** Exactly. Something produced by an LLM is "likely" if you get the next token, but not in the sense that it captures something aiming at truth. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** So there is another sense of "likeliness" there, very different from the ordinary one. Floridi uses the ordinary one. Lipton's use is slightly peculiar. **Nick:** I have the opium example somewhere in here, though. **Enrico:** The opium example, yes: "it makes you sleepy." I used to wonder why he thinks that is "likely," because to me it is a tautology or something like that. But what he means is: no, you have gone for truth so much that it becomes completely useless. **Nick:** Yeah, that's what he means by likeliness. **Enrico:** Exactly. So it is not statistical likeliness. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** Then, before the Lipton bit, still in the same paragraph, at the end: "A model trained on philosophical corpus is exposed to a distribution systematically skewed toward the properties theorists describe..." I cannot understand what this means. **Nick:** The last sentence of the paragraph before Lipton? **Enrico:** Yes, exactly. "A model trained on this corpus is therefore exposed..." That could be the last sentence of the paragraph, right? But then: what does it mean, "the properties theorists describe"? I don't understand what the properties are, and I don't understand who "the theorists" are. Probably you mean philosophers. **Nick:** Okay. **Enrico:** So again, the third example is okay, I think it's useful, but then comes this sentence concluding it and I don't see what it means. **Nick:** When you say you don't see what it means, do you mean you understand what I'm going for but you don't think it's expressed well, or do you mean you genuinely don't understand what I'm going for? **Enrico:** I don't really understand what you're going for. Then there is the child-grammar comparison: "a child can acquire grammatical competence without being given grammatical rules; exposure to enough well-formed speech is sufficient." That part is clear. And so an LLM is also exposed to a corpus... **Nick:** The analogy doesn't come through? **Enrico:** Yes. It doesn't clearly draw the analogy. It should say more directly: just as a child is exposed to proper language and learns to speak, the model is exposed to philosophy and learns something analogous. At the moment it feels overcomplicated. **Nick:** Yeah, probably it's better just to use the LLM itself rather than the child. **Enrico:** Yes, and "the properties theorists describe" is also bad, even if we replace the child with the LLM itself. **Nick:** Just for a second, I'm going to grab a glass of water. **Enrico:** Sure. **Enrico:** Then there is the paragraph that starts: "One may still insist that the model has only inherited the results of other people's ability..." The objection has force in empirical science, but the reason a standard [unclear] may depend on features of the world not exhausted by the scientific literature. **Nick:** "Standard" there is wrong, right? **Enrico:** Yes. "The reason a standard..." is a strange expression. "The reason a theory..." maybe. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** Sorry, maybe that was just an inline note and not how you write. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** But I have a deeper problem with the whole paragraph, not just the wording. The paragraph from "One may still insist..." until "that embodies them." **Nick:** Yeah? **Enrico:** The problem is that it feels like a conclusion without enough setup. The idea is that philosophy is part of the corpus, so the justifications for the standards are part of the corpus, whereas in science usually they are not. That relation needs to be made clearer. At the moment it feels a bit standing there by itself. **Nick:** Okay. **Enrico:** Then maybe here, I don't know, but perhaps instead of "it is not," say "surely it is not," just to make it a bit less assertive. "Blind review would be a defective practice, but it is not..." Maybe soften it slightly because people may think blind review is not such a good practice. **Nick:** Okay. **Enrico:** Then the Lipton part is abrupt, almost as if some footstep is missing. There needs to be a smoother connection; otherwise it's not clear why this quotation from Lipton appears right here. It comes a bit out of the blue. **Nick:** Probably we are introducing the quotation badly. **Enrico:** Okay. Then: the definitive version of section three. Let me find it. **Nick:** So to begin with, I'm not sure whether it should begin with Williamson or whether it should just jump straight into Searle. **Enrico:** No, I saw the comments. That part is not especially problematic. **Enrico:** What I found more problematic is the end of the paragraph: the Chinese room thing, "rule-following without comprehension." That fits better later. At this stage, bringing it in anticipates something too early, because one big thing about the Chinese room is precisely the feeling Searle has of not understanding anything while being inside the room. That cannot simply be reduced to the concept of rule-following. So maybe from "the same holds for the Chinese room..." up until "Einstein's imagination, perhaps," that bit should be cut or moved. **Nick:** Okay. Something like that. **Enrico:** Then I very much like the Austin part and the philosophical corpus. I think this paragraph, the one that ends with "philosophy does not usually begin from raw encounter; it begins from what has already been articulated," is very good. **Nick:** Maybe the Chinese room case could go after that? **Enrico:** Maybe, though I still have the same problem, because Searle is also a thought experiment. I still do not really see the difference between Searle and Einstein, since in both cases there is an intuition that has to do with introspection or first-person experience. So maybe use one or the other. **Enrico:** I'm not sure we explain why physics is supposed to require phenomenology while philosophy doesn't, because it seems maybe one reason is that philosophy already incorporates descriptions in the training set, whereas physics maybe has a training set made only of data. That is interesting, but I'm not sure. **Enrico:** So maybe if we can supplement the training set of physics with descriptions by people of their experience in elevators, then we would not need Einstein either. **Nick:** Would you mind saying that again so I'm clear? I think I understand it, but I want to be sure. **Enrico:** Yes. The problem I have with all that, which I like very much, is that I do not see that physics is so different from philosophy in a way strong enough for your point. The experiences relevant to Einstein's discovery seem to be experiences that can be described. So if the model can use descriptions instead of direct experience, I do not see a decisive difference between Einstein and Searle, or Einstein and philosophical thought experiments. They all rely on introspection and first-person experience. **Enrico:** Maybe the Einstein case is more embodied, whereas Searle or the trolley problem are less embodied. And Merleau-Ponty seems very similar to Einstein in that way. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** So it sounds to me that this section still needs to be a little more distilled, both in terms of the examples and in terms of the core idea. **Nick:** Yeah, okay. **Enrico:** But it is not just an editorial issue. I think there is a philosophical problem. At the moment, I do not think we give a reason to think physics and philosophy are so different. I think we have two options. One is to say: okay, we are also challenging Zahavi in the end. The other is to say: no, Zahavi is different, because there are reasons why physics works differently. **Enrico:** One reason might be that in physics one can think of the training set as based only on data, and not on descriptions. But maybe that is the good point: in physics you would then need to add descriptions too, because usually in physics papers you do not find descriptions of experience, though maybe in notebooks you do, since notebooks rely on things like Einstein's reflections. **Enrico:** On the other hand, you have the problem of philosophy: it is true that you have descriptions of experiences, but the point of thought experiments is precisely to find cases that do not seem to be there in what was described before. So again, this seems more like Einstein. For instance, Jackson's Mary case: the training set does not include the case of a scientist who grew up in a black-and-white room. So again, I do not see the difference with the Einstein case. **Enrico:** Unless you say: philosophy draws a lot on descriptions, whereas physics just draws on numbers. **Nick:** Did you have a chance to read [unclear]? **Enrico:** No, I can do that. Do you think it's worth it? **Nick:** I think it might be, because he's very much about the difference between science and philosophy, and he's a scientist as well. I sent this to you; I can send it again. **Enrico:** Yes, yes. I know. I just have to find it. **Nick:** Philosophy is a vocation of concepts. Where the physical world comes in for physics, or for science, versus where it comes in for philosophy. **Enrico:** Yes. Maybe that can help. The paper is not so long now, right? **Nick:** Under 7,000, I think. **Enrico:** Okay. So maybe we can still find something to say precisely on this, and then the paper is almost there. Although yes, we still need to work out whether to do the practical prompting thing or not. **Nick:** The final section could be: this is how you prompt. **Enrico:** Yes, but that is very ambitious. Another possibility is just to prepare the groundwork for showing, or at least alluding to, how these things could be used. **Nick:** Exactly. Maybe we can use the Adams quotation as a conclusion instead of as an introduction. **Enrico:** Yes: say that all we have seen may lead to a situation like that. Prompting could then be for another paper. **Nick:** That would be nice, because then we're almost at a finished paper. **Nick:** I wonder what other people would think. Is that a bit too much of a tease, to say "yes, this is all very important, but we're not going to tell you"? **Enrico:** We could go for a longer paper. Also, I'm slowly coming up with ways of framing these ideas, though they're a bit vague, so maybe not today. **Nick:** I did actually remember something interesting. At the moment, people are finding what are basically magic words you can use to make these things more powerful. I learned this from somebody on Twitter. He said: here's a useful phrase, "the CEV." CEV of an idea, or of a paragraph or passage. **Nick:** CEV is some fairly recent acronym, something like "coherent extrapolated volition." You say: here's my idea, and the CEV of this idea would be what the idea would be if I had already solved all the problems, if I had already cleared up what I think I want, if everything had been clarified and I understood everything perfectly. What would this paragraph actually look like? **Nick:** And basically this guy on Twitter said this is a hack, because the LLM knows what this means. So if you point that phrase, CEV, at something and say "give me the thing that I want even though I don't know what I want yet," it's very interesting. It pushes it in a particular way, and you can kind of force it to do philosophy for you like that as well. **Nick:** So there are things like this that might be interesting to talk about, whether in this paper or the next one. **Enrico:** Yes, that's super interesting. But I also think this connection to experience, and whether experience can be sedimented in text, is very interesting. I still struggle there. For instance, grief is always grief about something, and so on. Some creators also give descriptions of grief, not just present feelings of loss. Others would say: no, no, you've never really been through that grief. Maybe grief is much described in literature, maybe not in philosophy proper but in novels or cinema, and philosophy may draw on that. But I don't know. I have the impression that some philosophers would simply say no, that is not how it works, especially if you want innovative philosophy. **Enrico:** We can use mushroom-eating, but that is also not super satisfying. **Nick:** It's interesting you mention that. I've been struggling to work this stuff in, because I've been working quite a bit with your transcription, and you said, "this is the last important criticism to deal with," which is a phrase you used in the talk, and the LLMs were obsessed with it. But I want to read a bit more of that book, because there's some interesting stuff there. **Enrico:** Yes. I think that is where the most interesting questions arise. If you just fix details, that is okay, but maybe we can say more about the fact that [unclear]. The Floridi thing is not too difficult to deal with, because it seems like a straightforward consequence of "philosophy is in the text." If Floridi explains abduction only in psychological terms, then from our point of view that is simply missing the point. **Enrico:** So I'm not sure we should spend too much time dealing with that, because it is clearly wrong if philosophy is in the text. Then who cares whether the LLM is not doing abduction in that sense? Still, we can keep it because it is useful to introduce the issue. But the really interesting thing is the other objection. **Nick:** So I agree the Floridi thing has less meat. One thing we could do is actually fold it into something like section one. Section one could talk about philosophy being in the text and then move on to LLMs incorporating it a bit. We could say: Floridi is right that the mechanism is entirely different from what we are normally talking about, but then... **Enrico:** I think it was better in the PowerPoint: the way we framed Floridi there. The first thing is: because philosophy is in the text, that is more the continental point. But then we can have cases in which, even if we accept what I think Floridi should accept too, namely that the value is in the text, he can still say that the text cannot have value because the process is wrong. This is clearly the zombie point: it has no problem with the fact that the value is in the text. It just thinks that if you do not have the proper mental processes, you cannot produce a valuable text. **Enrico:** So I wonder whether, if we find a way of framing Floridi in this way, that would make section two much more worthwhile, and not just an easy objection. Because if the objection as we currently present it is just, "abduction is a psychological process," then our reply is simply, "we care about the text, not the mind," so who cares? In that sense, having four pages on Floridi seems too much. **Enrico:** But if we can frame Floridi as saying: without the psychological process, you cannot have a valuable abduction in the text, then that is the interesting point. Not that abduction is in the mind, but that without human abduction you cannot have valuable textual abduction. **Nick:** Just to be clear, could you go one more time about how you envisage reconfiguring the Floridi stuff? I want to make sure I understand it properly later. **Enrico:** Yes. Floridi can be interpreted in two ways. First: abduction is not in the text, it is in the mind. But for us that is not an especially interesting objection, because in the previous section we have just said that we focus on the text. So that kind of objection is not the one that really matters. **Enrico:** The interesting reading is: even if value is in the text, you cannot have valuable abduction in the text without abduction in the mind. So section two should slightly change. At the moment it seems to say: "Oh no, Floridi, we care about the text, not the mind, so your argument is weak." But we should instead construct Floridi's argument in the strongest form. Say: yes, abduction in the text exists, but you cannot have good abduction in the text without the proper psychological path to abduction. **Nick:** Good. Okay. **Enrico:** In that way his argument connects better to the paradigm-shift point too. Because then the issue is not just whether there is abduction, but whether there is good abduction, genuinely creative abduction. **Nick:** That's the best way of fighting them both, actually. The abduction-in-the-mind point and the phenomenology point. **Enrico:** Yes. It gives a nice shared framing: allegedly necessary routes to abduction in the text. So section one says: we focus on value in the text. Section two asks: can we have philosophy in the text without abduction in the mind? Section three asks: can we have philosophy in the text without embodied phenomenology in the mind? **Nick:** Absolutely. **Enrico:** Because Floridi does not appeal to consciousness, just to a certain way of organising information. **Nick:** Yeah. **Nick:** What I think I'm going to do is try to get section three sorted out properly first, because I think that's almost ready. I was thinking about this the other night, because there are very elegant examples to use. Colour experience is a very good one. I've been working on my notes, getting the colours carefully chosen and balanced, and the LLM says, "if you use this shade it won't pop as much as so-and-so." Those very fine-grained distinctions are a nice example of phenomenology being in the text. **Enrico:** Yes, exactly. That resonates with the Austin quotation. **Enrico:** The problem is that this seems to apply to physics too. Unless physics requires something more. Because with philosophy the real leaps in research seem not just to rely on colour experience, but on complex scenarios like Mary or zombies, which seem like Einstein. **Nick:** Yes. **Enrico:** And even the Chinese room seems like that. Sure, there are other domains where that matters less, but I think Zahavi would also agree that it depends on the domain. He thinks embodiment is always important, but still. **Enrico:** For instance, the Dummett case: my problem with the way it is presented is that it does not seem like a big discovery. It seems just obvious. On one reading, the contribution it makes to the third condition of a complex sentence is embedded. But that seems like something even a ten-year-old child can say: yes, you sent this as the meaning of this song, but if you put it in a bigger sentence it contributes to the meaning of the bigger sentence. So probably it is more complex than that, but it is not easy to process, or maybe it is not a good example. We need either to elaborate it more or make it more compelling. **Enrico:** There may also be too many examples in this section. **Enrico:** The Islamic one is also not especially familiar to me. I had never heard of this distinction. As I read it, it looked like an obvious distinction that does not require experience to be made. **Nick:** I'll admit that must have appeared in the most recent LLM version. That's not my idea. I had nothing to do with that. **Enrico:** It is something to fix. But yes, this is very interesting. I think if you can give more structure in the way we just said, then it will come together. **Enrico:** I was also thinking: once we frame these two objections in the same way, namely "you cannot have a good text without the proper psychological process," then maybe our reply is more or less the same in the two cases. Namely: yes, the psychological processes are sedimented in the text and can be used. So even though the LLM is doing statistics, it is a kind of statistics that tracks abductive reasoning in the Floridi case and phenomenological reasoning in the Zahavi case. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** Then we can also rely on the corpus point in the conclusion and show that in the end there is one objection with two sides: the more functional side and the more phenomenological side. Emphasising the importance of the corpus can allow us to deal with both objections, though in different ways. **Enrico:** In one case it is a matter of descriptions: the phenomenological objection can be met by saying that descriptions of phenomenological processes are in the corpus. That seems to be our argument. Even Einstein or Jackson, when they use their own phenomenological insights, turn them into descriptions. **Nick:** They don't just directly use them; they formulate them. **Enrico:** Exactly. So what really enters the argument is the description. If you already have the description, that is enough. **Enrico:** For Floridi it is a little different. There it is not a matter of having descriptions. It is more the fact that these forms of reasoning, these comparisons between possibilities, are already at work in the corpus. So the statistical process through the corpus gives you the right thing. In that sense it is already there, and the model brings it out. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** So we should frame it better, organise it better. The question is: can we produce valuable text without the proper psychological process? Our reply is: yes. Consider how the LLM works. Even though you do not have the psychological process, you have another process relying on the training set that can still give you the right kind of abductive or phenomenological result. **Nick:** Sort of functionally the same shape. **Enrico:** Exactly. First we say: there is the process and the text. Then we say: you cannot simply infer from the absence of the process that the model cannot do philosophy, because we are focusing on the text. That is section one. Then we consider the two objections: "yes, but you cannot have good text without abduction in the mind," and "you cannot have good text without phenomenology in the mind." **Enrico:** Our reply is: true, LLMs do not literally do those things, but they can have abduction-star and phenomenology-star, as it were, enough to generate the same kind of text. **Enrico:** I think that is the structure of the paper, and it should be clarified in the introduction and then used all the way through. At the moment the paper feels more like a patchwork of interesting ideas without a clear structure tying these two objections together. **Nick:** Yeah. **Nick:** So for one of them we're saying something about the training data, specifically descriptions in the data, right? And for the other we're saying something more about the mechanism itself. Is that right? **Enrico:** Yes. So the general structure is the same, but the details of the replies are different. We need two replies to the two different objections. **Nick:** I'm going to take a photo of your diagram as well. **Enrico:** Yes, you can take it. Then maybe you wanted to tell me about a different paper idea? **Nick:** Yeah, the aesthetics of functioning. **Enrico:** Yes, I think that's good. Let me reread what you said, because I presented that in Turin. They invited me at the Politecnico. So I will cite our forthcoming paper when we republish the beauty paper. **Nick:** Not newspapers? **Enrico:** No, no, the engineering aesthetics paper. The way I was thinking of presenting it very shortly is this: because these are engineering students and professors, they don't know the background, so it is just to introduce what aesthetic appreciation in engineering is. I took that from our paper. **Enrico:** This is a machine. That is all basically already in the paper. Then there is the appreciation of machine design as looking fit for function. That, I think, is the key point. They perform the same function, but they have different functioning. This notion of functioning is completely missing in the philosophy of technology. People care about function, but they conflate function with functioning. Function is more the outcome of the behaviour, whereas functioning is the process. **Enrico:** So stress the importance of this concept. And then say: this is not only true of technology, but also of nature. In biology, functioning is central. Organisms have the function of adapting to the environment and reproducing; then organs have functions too, the eye, the heart, and so on. But again, the heart can be a beautiful organ because it looks fit for the function of pumping blood; and it can also be beautiful for its rhythm, the way it moves. **Nick:** Right. **Enrico:** Wings are the same. Birds' wings are beautiful also because of the way they function. **Nick:** Exactly. That's the key. **Enrico:** I think that would make things more interesting and avoid repetition from the paper. The current paper may disappear into this bigger framework, which is a shame. **Nick:** Yes. **Enrico:** But if we have the general framework, we can show the differences too. We start with the general view that function is often discussed while functioning is overlooked or conflated with it. From an aesthetic perspective, at least, functioning seems as important as function, maybe more important. And there is also an analogy with agency: activities or processes versus object-functions. **Nick:** And the aesthetics of causality, which is similar. **Enrico:** Yes, and then we can draw the distinction between functioning and function more clearly where there is agency. Montero would come in there. Where there is no agency at all, as in nature, or where the agency is just the design of functioning, but not the functioning itself, then it's different. **Nick:** There are probably some nice contrast cases where you have the same job being done by a person with a utensil versus by a machine. You can say there is the beauty of the person doing it with grace and skill, and then another kind of beauty in the machine doing it. And then also a natural phenomenon. **Enrico:** Yes. In the human case you have conscious activity constitutive of the process. In the technological case the process itself does not have agency, but there is an intentional source that designed it. In the natural case you have neither. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** So I think that could be a very good paper. It would not be just the aesthetics of engineering; it would be the aesthetics of functioning, of which engineering is one instance, but there are others too. It is worth comparing the different instances and showing what is distinctive. **Enrico:** And then the conclusion: the clock, the bridge, and then I erased the black-box problem. Another thing is whether this is functioning. We can appreciate functioning through perception and so on, but we can also perceive functioning in a computer without looking inside the computer, because we can imagine it, we can have a kind of phenomenology of it. **Enrico:** So I think this would not be too expensive a paper. We could take the existing paper, rework it, and give it the right frame. **Nick:** I could plug the transcripts in in a minute and see what it can do. **Enrico:** Yeah. So maybe this is also a good reason to drop the Hong Kong thing. It's a pity, because it's a nice room, nice people, and it would have been a stepping stone to my honeymoon as well. **Nick:** You're going to Japan? **Nick:** We still want to go to Japan. We need to work out some dates when it's okay for me to leave and when it's okay for her to leave as well. **Enrico:** Okay. In that case maybe you can also wait more and leave later. It would not have to be immediate. **Nick:** I think Natalie would like to go before the summer. **Enrico:** Okay. But we will work something out. In that way you do not have to do too much too early. **Nick:** Yeah. **Enrico:** Also, with your back, probably it's the wisest choice to do that online. **Nick:** I wouldn't go to Finland though. Did you get into Finland? **Enrico:** No, I'm not. But actually there is another good thing in that case, because we are almost finished with the funding, so it is hard. But if we drop Hong Kong, then we surely still have funding for Finland. **Enrico:** So yes, let's see what happens. We will talk soon. In any case, there will be more time to work on these two papers. I'm not a huge fan of conferences. I'm much happier to be at home. **Nick:** I get that. Though it would be nice to have more contacts, but there will be other occasions. **Enrico:** Yes. And being online is not like being online in general. Their system is perfect. It actually works. **Nick:** Who is going in person? Maria? Michelle? Christina? **Enrico:** By the way, Maria Silvia told me [unclear]. It was nice. I told my friend that he's a designer and he was furious with me because I said designers have a job. **Nick:** Oh, and then we got this annoying email about the risk [unclear]. **Enrico:** I can do that myself, but maybe if you do it, it is better. I always complain, so it is better if somebody else complains and says: please take care about that, because it is crucial for us and for our work. It would be good to block that, to interrupt that problem. **Nick:** I don't mind complaining. I spoke with somebody from recruitment a few weeks ago as well. Basically everything was organised with my extension last year. We used the hands-up vote and so on. And then when I was in the hospital, this guy wrote to me and said: you have to sign this contract urgently, urgently, urgently. And I thought: why? Why have we waited two and a half months and now suddenly it is urgent? **Nick:** Sorry for complaining. **Nick:** Do you have anything fun to do this weekend? **Enrico:** Work, I think. Yes. Because next week I will go to Turin. **Nick:** These engineers? **Enrico:** Yes, yes, engineers. Because Verity, you remember her? I think she was there. She was the chair, I think, of [unclear] in Turin. She works on ethics of technology at the engineering school in Torino. She invited me. We'll see. But maybe I will also...