Dialogue On Philebus: The One And The Many

Can an algorithm care about its outcomes, and a computer observe itself? These were among the fascinating questions raised in our dialogue on the first part of The Philebus, when members of the Toronto Philosophy and Calgary Philosophy Meetup groups met on January 9, 2022. We began with the importance of distinguishing the one from the many, or the same and different, which is a key theme at the outset of Plato’s dialogue and the significant problem of categorization in today’s machine learning. Humans still excel in categorization and pattern-recognition, which Socrates points out is the way we derive meaning from speech and musical sound. Socrates raised the matter of the one and the many in his discussion with Protarchus when, in concluding the best life is a mixture of knowledge and pleasure, they investigate the difficulty of combining a fun ...