Orlando Stoics

If consciousness is known only from the inside, then no test run from the outside can settle the question. This week the group looks for what would count as evidence anyway. All three thinkers are working philosophers rather than commentators, and each leaves behind something that can be checked. We begin with Thomas Nagel. In "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) he grants that bats have experience and then shows that we cannot say what it is. A bat navigates by echo, a sense with no human counterpart, and imagining ourselves hanging in an attic tells us only what it would be like for us to behave as a bat behaves. The trouble is not that bats are exotic. It is that experience belongs to a point of view, and objectivity advances precisely by leaving points of view behind.

We then turn to Hilary Putnam, who moves the difficulty from experience to meaning. In "The Meaning of ‘Meaning’" (1975) he imagines Twin Earth, identical to ours down to the last person, except that the liquid in its rivers is not H2O but XYZ. Oscar and his twin are in the same mental state when each says water, yet each is talking about a different substance. Meaning is therefore not fixed inside the head. It depends on causal contact with the stuff and on a division of labor with people who can tell gold from pyrite. The group’s live question follows directly. A model trained on text alone has contact with the words for things and not with the things. Stevan Harnad named this the symbol grounding problem in 1990, and Emily Bender and Alexander Koller sharpened it in 2020 with an octopus that learns to answer flawlessly from eavesdropped messages and fails the moment it is asked to build something out of coconuts and rope.

Finally we will discuss David Chalmers, who converts the question into a list. In "Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?" (2023) he sets the hard problem aside and asks instead what mainstream theories of consciousness would demand of a machine. Biology. Sensory grounding. A world model and a self model. Recurrent processing. A global workspace. Unified agency. Current systems plainly lack most of these. Giving each requirement roughly a one in three chance of being real, he arrives at a credence under ten percent for today’s models and twenty five percent or more for their successors within a decade. He adds that the indicators are borrowed from theories never tested against each other. In 2025 they were. The Cogitate collaboration, which Chalmers took part in, challenged central claims of both global workspace and integrated information theory.

Friendship plays a central role in Stoic philosophy. While the Stoics viewed virtue as the foundation of a flourishing life, they also recognized that meaningful friendships enrich our lives and provide opportunities to practice wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.

Cicero's essay On Friendship (De Amicitia) raises questions that are still relevant today: What makes a true friend? How many friends should we have? Can friendship exist without virtue? During this session, we will discuss excerpts from the first fifty paragraphs of the book.

We'll explore a number of questions that sit at the heart of the essay. What is the foundation of a friendship, and where does our desire for it come from in the first place? Laelius argues that genuine friendship exists only between good people, so we'll ask what he really means by "good." We'll also consider questions that feel especially modern: what role does self-reliance play in friendships today, should we avoid having too many friends, and how can the friendships we keep help us become better people?

It helps to know the cast of characters behind the essay. The author is Marcus Tullius Cicero, who dedicates the work to his closest friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus. The main speaker is Gaius Laelius, who reflects on his deep bond with his best friend Scipio Aemilianus (Africanus the Younger), the model of ideal friendship throughout the piece. The essay itself unfolds as Laelius responds to questions posed by two younger men, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola.

No prior reading is required. We'll provide excerpts during the meeting and discuss them together.
English translations

Cada miércoles abrimos un espacio para leer juntos Las Meditaciones y conversar sobre cómo estas ideas pueden alegrar y fortalecer nuestra vida diaria.
No necesitas preparación previa, solo ganas de escuchar, compartir y disfrutar.
Ven con tu libro, tu café y tu sonrisa. ¡La tertulia se vuelve más bonita contigo!

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