Maybe you would agree that the brain idea must incorporate into its assumptions that natural scientific concepts such as functioning brain, neuron and physical law are not the product of human observation and representation of a world independent of our representations, but practices of interaction with others in the world — Joshs
It is not only that words model or describe sensory experiences; trivially, they are experiences, as much a part of our same stream of sensations as any others. Words and any models, therefore work precisely by being directly situated and enacted in the dynamics of experience in very complicated, nonlinear ways, whether in conversations with other people or ourselves, writing up and reading descriptions, learning, making predictions, engaging with math or pictorial representations, etc. Again, it is not a matter of models having some kind of essential nature as objects independent of the living context in which they are embedded; such a view is an idealization. There is no independently existing singular model of quantum mechanics or evolution; what exists are people with shared knowledge who enact that knowledge.
Models, and any word meanings for that matter, are nothing above the cause and effect mediated by people's implicit neuronal processes that drive the generation of future experiences in the context of the past. The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.
Well I think it is certainly a better story than just appealing to reason or metaphysical truth without any explanation of how people do it and without being open to the subtleties of people being fallible or interacting with the world in a perspective-dependent way.
And certainly, yes, I would believe my claims were better pr more correct than the immaterial soul. Better arguments in favour of it
I personally like Sokolowski's image here, that we should think of language (and our senses) as a lens we use to investigate the world. A lens is of course something you tend to look through not at. Hence, reason would ground the ability to translate between disparate conceptual schemes. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.
To be clear, "metaphysical truth" isn't some vague term I've concocted. — Count Timothy von Icarus
On the deflationary view, "truth" has no explanatory or metaphysical import. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So my point isn't meant to be handwavey. It's a straightforward denial of the idea that "reason" should be thought of as simply the ability to follow the rules within the context of any specific language game — Count Timothy von Icarus
But the assumption that this precludes access to a non-deflationary version of truth seems to need to assume that statements in language games are "what we know," not a means of knowing, or else that a short-lived positivist notion of correspondence truth is the only possible notion of metaphysical truth and that once it is defeated deflation must follow. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, better in virtue of what is the question, right? Better at approaching truth? Or better because they can be demonstrated from dominant hinge propositions in a given community? Is the goodness of an argument determine solely by the expectations of the people who are going to hear it? — Count Timothy von Icarus
I would just add that a thoroughgoing reflexivity between word and world implies that cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures are themselves responsive to, and continuously shaped by, the social world that they are exposed to and intertwined with. We can’t use biological concepts as the court of last appeal and legitimation for grounding conceptual meaning when they are not split off from the social milieu. — Joshs
I'm afraid that although I understand the first sentence, I think. I cannot understand the second sentence unless I substitute "people" for "brains". That's a bit puzzling because, of course, it's perfectly true that human people need functioning brains if they are to behave as people. I can't help wondering you are making the same mistake that people make when they say that my eyes see. They don't. Neither does my brain. People see, even though they cannot see without eyes or brains.Of course, words and concepts must be inherently evolved, developed, learned, used in a social context. Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate. — Apustimelogist
I take it that you are referring here to Wittgenstein's "We act blindly". So, again, I can only understand this by substituting "people" for "brain". Brains don't (cannot) walk or talk even though one cannot walk or talk without a brain. Whether they can be said to understand anything is not clear to me. Normally, we say that people understand or fail to understand, though we also accept that they could not understand anything if they did not have brains.Forms of life and language games are all just appeals to the blind behavior produced by the brain - in terms of both cognitive and motor-acts - in an interacting community of brains all "acting blindly" together: — Apustimelogist
Of course brains interact with their environments. But they don't interact with other brains, unless that's just a fancy way of saying that people interact with other people, in ways that they could not if they did not have brains. But you do have some definite claims.Plus, I have already mentioned how I think brains are a deeper explanation more fundamental - brains interacting with their environments, multiple brains interacting together. — Apustimelogist
I suppose you have in mind the (apparent) fact that AIs appear to be able to act on rules without being able to tell what rules they are following. But in that case, we can certainly work out what's going on from the results. I have no idea what would persuade us to accept that any machine, biological or not, is not working from any human-interpretable rules. If we can't identify the rule, we have no evidence that there is one. In any case, whatever the tasks are that brains and neurons are doing, they are not acting blindly in the sense that Wittgesntein had in mind - in fact they are not acting at all in the sense that people act.It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules. — Apustimelogist
Well, we agree on platonic representations of rules (if I've understood you right), and certainly, we do not (cannot) violate the laws of physics when we act; nor can our brains. But the idea that the laws of physics are not underdetermined is a big jump. So far as I can see, it contradicts (without refuting) the classic argument against induction. What have I missed?The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics. — Apustimelogist
"people" for "brains" — Ludwig V
And then, good understanding of whats happening here wants multiple levels of explanation spanning all fields from microbiology to evolution to linguistics, anthropology, social psychology to history and upward. No one field or level of explanation can do justice to everything. — Apustimelogist
Of course brains interact with their environments. But they don't interact with other brains — Ludwig V
I have no idea what would persuade us to accept that any machine, biological or not, is not working from any human-interpretable rules. — Ludwig V
But in that case, we can certainly work out what's going on from the results. — Ludwig V
in fact they are not acting at all in the sense that people act. — Ludwig V
But the idea that the laws of physics are not underdetermined is a big jump. — Ludwig V
My statement there is badly written, I'm afraid. I'm relieved to hear that it is an issue. I'll have to read the article later, but the summary is interesting.I have no idea what would persuade us to accept that any machine, biological or not, is not working from any human-interpretable rules.
— Ludwig V
Its a well-established issue in machine learning and I already had posted a paper talking about it in the context of neuroscience this thread: — Apustimelogist
Of course. But blindness resolves the infinite regress of interpretation and underdetermination, so it is a feature, not a bug.But in that case, we can certainly work out what's going on from the results.
— Ludwig V
Which is always our interpretation of what is going on and falls to the same kinds of rule-following issues as initially described - which inevitably would result in another appeal to blindness. — Apustimelogist
Of course they can. Everything interacts with everything else. The interesting questions are about how they interact and whether there are any limits. Surely brains don't interact directly with other brains, but only via a chain that connects them - roughly, via the bodies they live in. How do people and their interactions fit in to this chain?If brains are in their environment then of course they can interact with other brains. — Apustimelogist
That depends on whether you think people are important. They probably are not, at the level that you are talking about. Indeed, I wonder whether they exist at that level.Depends what you mean, I guess; but, not important. — Apustimelogist
Yes. I did read that. This is the idea that all science will, in the end, be unified into a single over-arching structure. That's an article of faith, or perhaps a programme of research. It certainly isn't a fact. What's worse, is that, by eradicating people from your causal chain, you seem to be reducing people to their brains. Perhaps unintentionally, but nonetheless, there's no conceptual space for them.I mean, I don't understand how you could think this as some kind of over-reductive description when I literally said in the same paragraph the following:
And then, good understanding of whats happening here wants multiple levels of explanation spanning all fields from microbiology to evolution to linguistics, anthropology, social psychology to history and upward. No one field or level of explanation can do justice to everything.
This is one level of description, appeal, explanation - made necessary by the fact that it explains how people behave and think, at least in the proximal sense. — Apustimelogist
Certainly. We agree on that.Wasn't necessarily imply they weren't underdetermined; but the point was that rule behavior is not determined by rule abstractions floating about in a platonic dimension. — Apustimelogist
If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules?It is determined by extremely complicated mechanistic processes in the world and our brains, as is the behavior which translates to our agreements about the applications of words and categorizations of behaviors. — Apustimelogist
If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules? — Ludwig V
“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.
“I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favor of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.
Yes. One quibble. Our conceptions of the physical and mechanistic will originate with us (collectively). What would it mean to found our indeterminate inter-subjective discursivity on them? I would have thought that some sort of inter-subjective discursivity would have to be in place in order to develop any conceptions of the physical and mechanistic. But then, how could we not have a conception of the physical and mechanistic if we can discourse between ourselves?when we posit conceptions of the physical and the mechanistic and attempt to found indeterminate intersubjective discursivity on these. — Joshs
I like that. It doesn't have a hierarchy and requires only an arbitrary starting-point.The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other. — Evan Thompson
That's brilliant. Would you care to share the reference? Then I could quote it too.The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
But blindness resolves the infinite regress of interpretation and underdetermination, so it is a feature, not a bug. — Ludwig V
You think that the AI's hidden rules resolve the "problem" of blindness. I don't see how. If you are accepting that they are interpretable by humans, how do they not have the same problems as any other rules? To put the question another way, if the AIs rules cannot be understood by human beings (or even, if you insist, by other AIs, how would "correct" and "incorrect" have any meaning? To put the point yet another way, if the AIs rules really were uninterpretable by human beings, what meaning would "correct" and "incorrect" have? — Ludwig V
Surely brains don't interact directly with other brains, but only via a chain that connects them - roughly, via the bodies they live in. — Ludwig V
This is the idea that all science will, in the end, be unified into a single over-arching structure. That's an article of faith, or perhaps a programme of research. It certainly isn't a fact. What's worse, is that, by eradicating people from your causal chain, you seem to be reducing people to their brains. Perhaps unintentionally, but nonetheless, there's no conceptual space for them. — Ludwig V
If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules? — Ludwig V
The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
That's brilliant. Would you care to share the reference? Then I could quote it too. — Ludwig V
However, this is not a simple matter of physical laws, but requires an intervening layer, like the software in a computer. — Ludwig V
Those sub-routines will involve implementation of rules - otherwise they cannot possibly be successful or even unsuccessful. — Ludwig V
Yes. In a sense, the processes act blindly. But that implies that they follow rules, which they don't. They do not differentiate between following a rule and not following it. They don't recognize rules. So they don't explain them - any more than they explain why 2+2=4 and not 5.I was just trying to hit home that meaning behavior comes from processes which are independent of our own notions of meaning. — Apustimelogist
If "the world" is not coherently accessible, our inference that it behaves consistently regardless of who is looking is a hope, not a fact.By physical laws I just meant the way the world tends to behave independently of perspective; obviously this is not coherently accessible, but we infer that there id a world that exists and behaves consistently regardless of who is looking. — Apustimelogist
How is that not reductionist? The bitter truth is the physics is just another way of conceptualizing the world, another lens through which to survey it. And that conceptualization cannot recognize rule-following behaviour. Causes are not correct or incorrect. They just are what they are.Physics is the ultimate grounding since brain dynamics, computational behaviors are in principle implemented in the entities of physics. — Apustimelogist
I hope there's a typo there and you meant that know-that is a special case of know-how. I would agree with that. Articulating one's knowledge is also a case of a know-how that is quite distinct from the know-how that one is articulating. Quite a surprise - especially to philosophers!know-that is a special case of know-that - or at least that is how it is implemented. Know-that is enacted. — Apustimelogist
Forgive my ignorance, but I had this naive impression that an algorithm is a rule.mindless algorithms — Apustimelogist
Yes. In a sense, the processes act blindly. But that implies that they follow rules, which they don't. They do not differentiate between following a rule and not following it. They don't recognize rules. So they don't explain them - any more than they explain why 2+2=4 and not 5. — Ludwig V
If "the world" is not coherently accessible — Ludwig V
How is that not reductionist? The bitter truth is the physics is just another way of conceptualizing the world, another lens through which to survey it. — Ludwig V
Causes are not correct or incorrect. They just are what they are. — Ludwig V
Forgive my ignorance, but I had this naive impression that an algorithm is a rule. — Ludwig V
These processes are not meant to explain the rules, they explain our behavior despite underdetermination. — Apustimelogist
Yes, and they explain in a proximal sense all our rule-following behaviors in principle. — Apustimelogist
I'm sorry. I really don't understand what you are getting at. We are agreed that we need functioning brains to do plus tasks. I don't understand anything beyond that.what neurons are doing in my brain are not related to the semantics of "plus" and you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks. — Apustimelogist
Can you explain what the semantic notion of "plus" is?you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks. — Apustimelogist
I hope there's a typo there and you meant that know-that is a special case of know-how. I would agree with that. Articulating one's knowledge is also a case of a know-how that is quite distinct from the know-how that one is articulating. Quite a surprise - especially to philosophers!know-that is a special case of know-that - or at least that is how it is implemented. Know-that is enacted. — Apustimelogist
I don't understand anything beyond that — Ludwig V
I don't need to explain how mindless neurons do plus tasks, because they don't do plus tasks. — Ludwig V
Saying that I act blindly when I do a plus task is saying that there is no need of and no room for an explanation how I do them. — Ludwig V
I think you believe a philosophical thesis that physics is the ultimate grounding of everything — Ludwig V
and that you therefore infer that my neurons must be doing something relevant. My problems are first that I don't accept the philosophical thesis that there is/must be an ultimate grounding of everything and second that you don't seem able to explain what the relevance of my neurons is. — Ludwig V
I hope there's a typo there and you meant that know-that is a special case of know-how. — Ludwig V
a mechanistic component cannot be inherently interpreted in terms of a semantic component. If you look at a brain performing a plus task, our description of 'plus' is not interpretable in terms of our description of how neurons are actually performing the task.
Neurons are precisely what is performing a plus tasks for you. The biology and dynamics of neurons account for everything about your ability to do a plus task.
Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from. — Apustimelogist
The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, compounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their components, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.
Does physics ground mathematics?In what sense do you mean that physics does not ground everything? Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from. — Apustimelogist
H'm what does "in some sense" mean? Brains no doubt navigate their environment - the body. But I don't navigate that environment (under normal conditions); the environments I do navigate are all "external" to the body.Of course, words and concepts must be inherently evolved, developed, learned, used in a social context. Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate. — Apustimelogist
I know what a "plus" task is. Hence, I know that brains/neurons don't do the plus tasks that I do. I don't understand what you mean by "the semantic notion of 'plus'". Are you by any chance saying that brains/neurons do plus tasks without knowing what they mean? Somewhat as a small child might move a chess piece without knowing the rules of chess?what neurons are doing in my brain are not related to the semantics of "plus" and you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks. — Apustimelogist
Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"?I didn't mean mechanistic in such a narrow sense as you do here. — Apustimelogist
I expect it will. One of the obvious features of life in general and people in particular is that they are autonomous. Whether those systems approaches can answer all the questions is another issue. On the surface, it looks as if they leave out the notion of a person, which implies that their scope will be limited.Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental. — Joshs
One of the obvious features of life in general and people in particular is that they are autonomous. Whether those systems approaches can answer all the questions is another issue. On the surface, it looks as if they leave out the notion of a person, which implies that their scope will be limited — Ludwig V
Francisco Varela provides “a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless virtual self, an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes” ( Shaun Gallagher).
As unenlightened beings, we mistakenly believe on a deep emotional level that there does exist a real “I” or ego within our mind and body, and therefore our experience of ourselves and others is profoundly egocentric… One mentally imposes an intrinsic “I-ness” and an intrinsic “otherness” onto phenomena, but “I” and “other” are simply relative designations imputed onto elements in which there is no inherently existing “I” and “other.” Each “I” is an “other,” and each “other” is an “I.” (Evan Thompson)
“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”…
The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable…
“If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious ‘I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool.(Nietzsche)
Does physics ground mathematics? — Ludwig V
H'm what does "in some sense" mean? — Ludwig V
But I don't navigate that environment (under normal conditions); the environments I do navigate are all "external" to the body. — Ludwig V
I know what a "plus" task is. Hence, I know that brains/neurons don't do the plus tasks that I do. — Ludwig V
Are you by any chance saying that brains/neurons do plus tasks without knowing what they mean? — Ludwig V
Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"? — Ludwig V
Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate.
— Apustimelogist
H'm what does "in some sense" mean? — Ludwig V
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