Browsing by Author "Moura, Martinho"
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- A study in the ethics of Kant and MacIntyrePublication . Moura, MartinhoIn this brief essay, I intend to analyze, and contrast, two ethics. The ethics of Immanuel Kant, philosopher of the 18th century, and the ethics of the AristotelianThomist Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most distinguished moral philosophers of our days. Thus, I will contrast formalism with teleology; acting out of duty and being virtuous. For Kant, knowledge of metaphysics is not possible. Man knows 27 phenomena; he knows what his structure of perception allows him to know. Evidently, Kant does not fall into subjectivism – we all have the same structure of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is, therefore, valid knowledge, which results from a synthesis process operated by the transcendental subject. For the Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, there is a telos, a purpose for life. Contrary to what happens with Immanuel Kant's philosophy of knowledge, it is not the subject that unifies reality. Unity is organic, it is organized; she is real. The subject thus has the ability – which necessarily goes beyond his/our understanding – to peer into the essence of an object. Human beings have a superior inclination, and the world is moved by the love of God. God acts according to a final cause, and this drift of love results from a typically human animality, which can only be accepted naturally. Bearing in mind that there are no great ideas that do not imply a certain vision of social order, we will reflect on the social and political visions that can only result from these two distinct ways of thinking.
- There is no artificial intelligencePublication . Moura, MartinhoPhysicalism consists in the idea that there is a world out there; It turns out that it is not experiential. It is a material world, where matter is something that can be exhaustively described by numbers or quantities. It is a world without qualities such as sounds, colors, flavors. The world is purely quantitative and, because we are part of that world, we are also purely quantitative. Physicalism argues that the entire world of qualities is generated in a not very well specified way and by a brain inside our head. Descartes attributed the domain of qualities to the thinking substance or subjectivity, where qualities are not part of reality. I want to argue that things like computers are in consciousness, but they are not conscious because they are not intelligent and never will be. Computers do not have a private life because this only happens to those who have an intellect that is irreducible to the cosmos. Only an immaterial entity can see the immeasurable qualities of the world that are the essences of reality. Human intelligence does not only result from greater complexity, but from the fact that human beings have an intellectual soul that allows them to see reality. Only an immaterial entity can see the essences of reality, such as beauty, truth and moral values that exist in a natural law that we perceive. Computers cannot make poetry or music because they are not — like us, humans — between two realms: the realm of spacetime and the realm of eternity.