So, if what you want is against a law, you probably shouldn't do it because you can anticipate formal retribution of some kind. If what you want is against a moral precept, whether you should do it or not depends on how much you need the community's support. If what you want conflicts with the desires of a neighbour, you should weigh the foreseeable consequences against the immediate satisfaction. If what you want is a matter of indifference to most of your fellow citizens, go ahead and do it. — Vera Mont

An even more effective e approach is to anticipate how your actions are likely to be misunderstood by others so that you can ‘fly under the radar’ and get what you want without causing others to be threatened by what they don’t understand.

Guilt can be elicited through these stories due to our cultural rituals surrounding acts being blameworthy or priaseworthy, but the story that comes from the guilt isn't the guilt. Our culture invokes guilt in particular circumstances as a means for teaching people to be good (or obedient, or whatever) and the stories arise from that basic manipulation. The particular circumstances of ones own guilt is the narrative, but guilt is an emotional response from an attachment of some kind (the attachment could be as simple as "See clouds:Feel guilt:Explain guilt" -- it needn't make rational sense for the guilt to be there. — Moliere

I’m not inclined to separate guilt as physiological arousal
or somatic sensation from guilt as cognitive assessment. I think the former are meaningless without understanding their basis in the latter. If guilt , or emotion in general is irrational, then rationality itself is irrational. I believe the basis of affect is the assessments that come from our attempts at sensemaking, the extent to which we are able to experience events as intelligible, recognizable, coherent with our aims. Emotion is the barometer that indicates whether we are falling into hole of confusion or confidently assimilating events. Whether a culture invokes guilt or not, an individual will not experience guilt unless they perceive their actions to violate their standards for themselves, regardless of whether this conforms to society’s expectations and norms. Guilt is a crisis of identity that is triggered whenever we discover that our actions dont conform to what we consider our values to be. Guilt is an emotion reflecting the growing pains of personal transformation. To make any significant change in one’s outlook is to risk feelings of guilt.

Guilt need not be so narratively driven -- it can be triggered by any number of events and memories, and need not make any kind of sense. I can feel my guilt is unjustified, because I know that the person guilt-tripping me is eliciting a response -- I still feel the guilt, but that doesn't mean I'm really sorry or think of myself as not-good or needing-to-be-good. — Moliere

My favorite psychologist, George Kelly, defined guilt as the perception of one's apparent dislodgment from one's core role structure. Whatever one does in the light of their understanding of others' outlooks may be regarded as their role. In guilt, our falling away from another we care for could be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. One feels as if “having fallen below the standards [one has] erected for himself”

It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss.
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↪Joshs - You can multiply examples of misused blame and judgment all day, just as I can multiple examples of misused knives all day. Neither one of us would be showing that blame or knives are inherently evil.

Do you think praise can exist without blame?

(Note that the example of being "too pre-emptive" is an example of misused blame, or on your account, its antecedent.) — Leontiskos

I don’t think praise can exist without disappointment, which is of course different from blame. We blame when we try our best to understand the motives of another in such a way that we can see those motives as morally justified. In an ideal scenario, it is only after we exhaust all possible generous ascriptions of their acts that we throw up our hands and reluctantly blame them. I am very sympathetic to the enormous difficulty of making sense of the often mysterious behavior of others. All I can tell you is that I’ve never met an immoral, evil, blameworthy or unjust person. It is not that I’ve never felt anger and the initial impulse to blame, but when I undergo the process of trying to make intelligible their motives I am always able to arrive at an explanation that allows me to avoid blame and the need for forgiveness. Furthermore, there is a fundamental philosophical basis for what I assert is the case that it is always possible to arrive at such a non-blameful explanation that can withstand the most robust tests in the real world. Having said that, I’m aware that my view is a fringe one. I only know of one other theorist who has come up with a similar perspective. I’m also aware that my view will be seen as dangerously naive.

On intrinsic nature.

The temptation to say "I see it like this", pointing to the same thing for "it" and "this". Always get rid of the idea of the private intrinsic nature in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — Banno

I don’t want to speak for TClark, but the way inner nature, or Buddha nature, is understood within a variety of contemporary philosophical perspectives is via the concept of no-self, a cognitive system with no homuncular ‘I’ driving it. As Varela explains "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole".

The ethical significance of the realization of no-self is that “when there are no more boundaries between myself and the other – when I am the other and the other is me – there can be no animosity, hatred, or anxiety between us. This is the crux of St. Augustine's famous saying: Ama, et fac quod vis (Love, and do what you will). Love – understood in terms of the Christian selfless love (agape), analogous to Buddhist compassion (karuna) – is the cohesive force of interbeing, the (groundless) ground of genuine peace and co-existence. “(Sebastian Voros)

The question is whether T Clark sides with Buddhists like Menscius, who asserts that the Good is tied up with natural kinds of innate dispositions, or with a no-self notion of inner virtue.

Shaun Gallagher writes:

If we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in
Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering. In
some Buddha traditions, the notion of self is associated with suffering, the notion of compassion is directed towards suffering in the sense that we are trying to reduce suffering, not only of oneself, but also of others. One can conceive of this selflessness in terms of skilled effortful
coping which is associated with the Taoist idea of what is called not doing. When one is the action, no residue of self-consciousness remains to observe the action externally.
In the Buddhist practice of self deconstruction, to forget one self is to realize ones emptiness , to realize that one’s every characteristic is conditioned and conditional. so it’s this appeal to this notion of a selfless type of phenomenon that for Varela really constitutes the sort of core of the notion of goodness, since in fact by eliminating the self one eliminates suffering, and one acts
compassionately.

When you or Joshs talk about guilt this way it is much the same as claiming that a tool such as a knife is inherently evil, and imputing bad motives to everyone who uses knives. The problem is that predications of guilt and use of knives are not inherently evil acts. For example, if you get rid of knives then you get rid of a great deal of nutritious cooking, and if you get rid of guilt then you also get rid of praise and merit. Like a knife, the idea of guilt can be used for good or evil. There is no reason to believe that it is inherently evil — Leontiskos

I would rather compare the knife to our ability to place constructions on events as a tool for cutting reality at its joints. If we are too pre-emptive in how we set up our discriminations, then the intentions of others can appear as a peculiar, disordered chaos, which, measured against the relative coherence of our original assessment of their relation to us makes them appear to us now as irrational, preposterous, stubborn, lazy, malevolent, at the mercy of mysterious impulses, failing to live up to our expectations of them. Our blamefulness judfent, then, is an attempt to salvage predictive value from the only ordered construction available to us to make sense of an aspect of the other person's thinking. Despite this construction having proved unreliable, attempting to get the wayward other to conform to the original expectations (knock some sense back into them, get them to admit their guilt) is the elaborative choice we must make when the alternative is dealing with a person whose behavior in a sphere of social life that is of vital concern to us we can no longer make sense of at all.

Beyond everything that's been written here, I don't think a system that "revolves around anger and blame" is the most effective way of addressing social conflicts. — T Clark

Maybe you and I should start a movement.

If they undergo as much change as the terms for water , then isn’t a phrase like actual physical referent linguistically self-referential, belonging to the hermeneutic circle along with our changing terms for water, rather than sitting outside of it?
— Joshs
Yes. Terms like "actual physical referent" or "materialism" are increasingly difficult to use in philosophical discussion. That's one reason for doubting how useful the concept of a hermeneutic circle is. Language constantly seems to refer beyond itself, and our practices do not find it difficult to use those terms. Isn't that as good as it gets for defining an outside? — Ludwig V

I’m not sure we’re understanding ‘hermeneutic circle’ the same way. The circle of discursive practice is not closed in on itself such that it is sealed off from the empirical world. On the contrary, language expresses material practices. For hermeneuticists like Gadamer, the circle indicates that we are neither spinning our wheels in a conceptual void nor at the behest of an independent empirical outside, but involved in a back and forth between lingustic conceptualization and a world that talks back to our concepts within the language that we use , and according to the questions we ask in to make sense of it.’ As Wittgenstein showed, words only have meaning in their actual use , exposed to and altered by fresh contexts of intersubjective situations.

To understand all is to forgive all? I doubt it.
And I take exception to 'lockstep' applied to willing participation in a community, or adherence to a culture. All cultures have some leeway for individual variation - the more militaristic and authoritarian ones, less than the liberal, egalitarian ones, but always some.
Humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities. — Vera Mont

To understand all is not to need to forgive in the first place. Forgiveness requires a prior assessment of moral blame and culpability. As far as your assertion that humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities, the question is where and to what extent you see that understanding and tolerance as breaking down. I am admittedly on the fringe on this issue. I happen to believe that every time one become angry and feels the need to admonish another , or to forgive them, one is failing to understand things from the other’s vantage. Our culture and justice system revolve around anger and blame. Even those of us who believe there are profound flaws in our legal system would defend the need to point out malevolent intent and irrational thinking in themselves and others.

I think what I mean by "will" is what Heidegger calls being ahead of myself. Not sure about that. It is possible to act without getting ahead of oneself — T Clark

I can go with that.

But isn't there a great deal of pleasure and exhilaration derived from such judging and punishing? You might as well try to stop people from having sex. — Tom Storm

Speaking of sex, one could raise the question of the motivation behind sadism and masochism. Where does the pleasure from causing others or oneself pain come from? Looking at self-harm, normally pain gets in the way of achieving goals. In itself, pain is the loss of personhood, a kind of confusion. But acts of self-harm like cutting involve using pain as a means to an end which is self-affirming. But what about pleasure from harming others? The more we relate to an other as being like ourselves , the more we care about them , the more likely we are to treat their pain as our pain. The pleasure from the desire to judge and punish is bound up with our feelings toward those who we do not relate to, or used to but not anymore, those we are alienated from. In such cases punishment protects us from their alienating influence. It reinforces our sense that we are on the ‘right track’, and perhaps reduces our urge to try those things we are punishing the other for, the very things
we have been tempted by but didn’t have the nerve to go through with.

Where a group has consensus in its needs, self-image and values, the moral structure doesn't have to be enforced; it's taught to the young by example and taken for granted. — Vera Mont

My favorite psychologist, George Kelly, made a distinction from. between aspects of social organization, the situation of sharing common ways or values, and understating each others motives.
Kelly says:

While a common or similar cultural background tends to make people see things alike and to behave alike, it does not guarantee cultural progress. It does not even guarantee social harmony. The warriors who sprang up from the dragon’s teeth sown by Jason had much in common but, misconstruing each other’s motives, they failed to share in a constructive enterprise and soon destroyed each other. For people to be able to understand each other it takes more than a similarity or commonality in their thinking. In order for people to get along harmoniously with each other, each must have some understanding of the other.

This is different from saying that each must understand things in the same way as the other. In order to play a constructive role in relation to another person one must not only, in some measure, see eye to eye with him but must, in some measure, have an acceptance of him and of his way of seeing things. We say it in another way: the person who is to play a constructive role in a social process with another person need not so much construe things as the other person does as he must effectively construe the other person's outlook

What most think of as a moral structure is only needed to the extent that people fail to see eye to eye on the interpretation of each others motives. It doesnt matter how closely individuals try to keep in lockstep with the larger society’s expressed values. They can never take for granted that they will avoid the need to morally blame and punish others if those values don’t include a means of understanding why other deviate from the normative expectations.

I'm not talking about nirvana or nothingness. Application of will is not the only way to act in the world. Looking at my own behavior, I can see that much of what I do I do without any kind of self-consciousness or intention. Taoism has a term, "wu wei." It means, roughly, acting without acting. Acting from our deepest nature. If you don't like that, you can just say conscience, although that's not exactly the same thing. — T Clark

Willing, wanting, choosing, desiring don’t have to be thought of as volunteristic, as choosing in advance what we will. I would argue that we find ourselves choosing; we are compelled by the contextual circumstances we are thrown into to want and desire in specific directions prior to any reflection or consciousness. Self-conscious reflection occurs as a later and derivative mode of willing. This is the difference between unreflective mindful coping and abstract conceptual rationality. The latter is a derivative of the former, which is the fundamental way we engage with the world. Heidegger wrote:

One cannot construct being-in-the-world from willing, wishing, urge, and propensity as psychical acts.The desire for this conversation is determined by the task I have before me. This is the motive, the "for the sake of which". The determining factor is not an urge or a drive, driving and urging me from behind, but something standing before me, a task I am involved in, something I am charged with. This, in turn—this relation to something I am charged with—is possible only if I am "ahead" of myself.

As far as the notion of deepest nature, I would say that any desire or choice focals and gathers together a background of intricately connected thoughts and feelings that comprises our remembered history. It expresses and carries forward this whole intricate mesh of meanings. Willing is intentional in the sense that it arises as a relevant elaboration of our deeply integrated goals and expectations, despite the fact that we find ourselves choosing and willing before conscious reflection. This is what Francisco Varela calls ethical know-how.

You might enjoy this:

In a modern, diverse, dysfunctional society, those conflicts between personal and social standards arise several times a day. Mostly in minor matters, where the individual can either get away with an infraction or compromise his own principles.
Either choice, multiplied by millions of people in millions of instances, can bring down a civilization. — Vera Mont

Many may argue that it is moral structures that prevent civilizations from unraveling. Perhaps T Clark’s point is that the reliance on moral principles may keep cultures from becoming more civilized, by fostering reliance on the violence of authoritarianism, punishment and social repression.

. I guess this sounds a bit like Nietzsche’s ubermensch. Although I haven’t looked into his philosophy deeply, I don’t think it is. Taoism is a profoundly humble philosophy. It doesn’t suggest a celebration of the will but rather a surrender of it. — T Clark

What does one surrender the will to but another will? The will to nirvana, to nothingness, to surrender is still a willing. To stop willing is to cease to experience difference and becoming, since desire is just another word for difference.

What's interesting is that the bolded is true in two senses. First, there is etymological analysis, looking at old texts to determine how some term came to mean what it does. But second, there is looking into the actual physical referents of words to see what they are. So for instance, we know a lot of things about water that we didn't know in 1700. Even grade school kids know that water is H2O. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what about the etymology of terms like ‘actual’ and ‘physical’? If they undergo as much change as the terms for water , then isn’t a phrase like actual physical referent linguistically self-referential, belonging to the hermeneutic circle along with our changing terms for water, rather than sitting outside of it?

You can do possible things. You cannot do impossible things.

You cannot point to something that is outside the universe.

You are part of the universe. Your thoughts are part of the universe. Language is part of the universe.

You cannot reference not-universe in any way. It is flat out, unequivocally, impossible. — Treatid

The universe is not a box with furniture in it (whether understood as individual bits or relationally and linguistically) which it is our job as scientists to describe. It is a continually changing development, and we change along with it. Thanks to the unidirectional arrow of time, the universe is continually outside itself, continually overcoming its former states. Freedom is built into the real, and the past doesn’t determine the future, it only provides constraints and affordances.

Everything humans have achieved is what is possible. Aligning our expectations with reality will be orders of magnitude more productive than the alternative. — Treatid

Reality is a moving target. Knowledge is praxis, a way of changing how we interact with our world in ways that are useful to us. The changes we make in our interactions with the world feed back into our understanding to further change our knowledge. There is no limit to the variety of ways we can scientifically construe our world. A multitude of competing accounts can all be ‘true’, that is, can work perfectly well for what we wish to do with them. Some ways will be found to be more useful others.

The ‘why’ is bound up with the qualitative structure of the theory which explains and organizes the observation. As one theoretical explanation is overthrown for another, the ‘why’ changes along with it.
— Joshs

Except that can't be correct.

"Because I said so." "Because God decreed it." "Because it does."

Physics runs into the same infinite recursion as asking what caused the universe. At each stage there is still the question "what caused that cause?". — Treatid

The model of mechanical causation may not be the best way to understand the historical development of scientific theories. Efficient cause is itself a theoretical perspective, one which only emerged at a particular point in the history of science and has undergone numerous modifications. It was developed for , and is most useful for dealing with the behavior of non-living phenomena, but runs into trouble when we try to explain living systems this way. Over the course of your life you have likely formed and changed overarching perspectives or worldviews a number of times. Do you want to understand each new perspective as caused by the previous in the way the behavior of billiards balls are caused by each other, or is there a more useful way of understanding the development of ideas in persons and cultures? Complex dynamical systems theory is one alternative to linear causation that can be applied to ‘why’ questions without the risk of infinite regress. Since they function via the principles of non-linearity, they dont run into the problems of linear causation models. Put simply, in a dynamical system, the effect is not the mere product of a pre-assigned cause, but modifies the cause. Cause and effect are reciprocally affected by each other.

As chatgpt says

Complex dynamical systems exhibit nonlinear effects and a type of causality called causal spread, which is different from efficient causality. The interactions and connectivity required for complex systems to self-organize are best understood through context-sensitive constraints

You obviously understand that full knowledge (truth) requires all the contexts.

This is my proposal. This is where I think we can make progress as philosophers and as humans. This is where the pursuit of knowledge lies. This is the path to all possible understanding. True, we can't reach the limit - but we can approach that limit. — Treatid

I’m wondering how far you’re willing to push the role of context in relation to the progress of knowledge. I’d like to we you push it to the limit. That means socorro’s g he idea that knowledge is the matching of our concepts to a world independent of our schemes. Context is critical because both we and our world are in continual motion. We have a system of constructs that are organized hierarchically into subordinate and superordinate aspects such that most new events are easily subsumed by our system without causing any crisis of inconsistency. When we embrace new events by effectively anticipating them, our system doesn’t remain unchanged but is subtly changed as a whole by the novel aspects of what it encounters. The world as I perceive it is already shaped by my construct system, so it is not the same objective world for everybody. What appears consistent or inconsistent, true false , harmonious or contradictory, is not the result of a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other.

The better we understand a given concept, the better we understand every other concept. — Treatid

Are you familiar with Saussurian linguistics? It’s the same idea, drawing from a movement within philosophy and the social sciences called structuralism. Gestalt psychology is another example ( the whole precede the parts). With the later Wittgenstein and the structuralists, however, the focus is shifted to the way the use of a word concept changes the nature of the whole chain of meanings.

The true nature of the universe of mathematical facts makes lots of people uncomfortable.

Imagine that we had a copy of the theory of everything?

It would allow us to mathematically prove things about the physical universe. It would be the best possible knowledge that we could have about the physical universe. We would finally have found the holy grail of science.

What would the impact be?

Well, instead of being able to predict just 0.1% of the facts in the physical universe, this would improve to something like 0.3%; and not much more. — Tarskian

The most powerful implication of chaos theory , and complex dynamical systems theory, is that phenomena that appeared within previous frameworks to be merely random are in fact intricately ordered. This is a deterministic order , but it can’t be discovered by using a linear causal form of description. It is a concept of chaos as a special sort of order, not something in opposition to it, as the title of the OP seems to suggest. It is necessary to understand how recursivity and non-linearity function to produce complex global behavior that cannot be reduced to a linear determinism. I think the lesson here is that the most vital aspect of scientific understanding is not search for certainty but patterned relationality. A much richer and more useful form of anticipatory predictiveness becomes available to us once we give up the goal of certainty. The universe isn’t certain in a mathematical sense because it is constantly changing with respect to itself, but it is changing in ways that we can come to understand more and more powerfully.

I’m much less interested in how many decimal places
one can add to a particular mathematical depiction of a scientific theory than I am in how that theory organizes the phenomena that it attempts to mathematize. The sacrifice of that precision for the sake of an alternate theory which organizes events in a more intricate way is well worth the loss of precision.

It is very convincing, because it sounds scientific, and because it insists that it is scientific, and especially because you will get burned at the Pfizer antivaxxer stake if you refuse to memorize this sacred fragment from the scripture of scientific truth for your scientific gender studies exam.

As you can see, everybody who craves credibility insists on sailing under the flag of scientism and redirect the worship and adulation of the masses for the omnipotent powers of science to themselves and their narrative. — Tarskian

I’m detecting a distinct political slant here. Is it Libertarianism? Trumpism? Anarchism? Would I be right to surmise that you are not a backer of climate change science?

All of the reasons for or against suicide (including "moral" reasons) come up short against the opacity of death. That is, we don't know what happens when we die. Those who have a strong stance on suicide almost necessarily have a strong stance on what happens when we die. The only caveat is that someone who is suffering may believe that anything is better than their current suffering, and hence they may wish to commit suicide regardless of what happens when we die. — Leontiskos

:up:

The rational observer can usually see both sides and explain why they are different.
I am asking respondents to be that observer — Vera Mont

The ‘rational observer’ who believes that different rational perspectives can be subsumed within one overarching notion of rationality which unites them will be at risk of explaining the difference between perspectives by blaming one of them for being irrational or poorly thought out.

So you would have 'don't care' mapped to unknown? — Tom Storm

Or ‘none of the above’.

For suicide to be rational, one would have to believe that the destruction of sentience brings with it the relief of suffering. That might seem to be obvious , but one might instead surmise that death has no effect on current suffering, precisely because it can’t be experienced.

The world of mathematical truth does not look like most people believe it does. It is not orderly. It is fundamentally unpredictable. It is highly chaotic — Tarskian

I’m not sure what ‘true’ as ineffability is supposed to mean here in the context of chaos and unpredictability. Could you say a little more about what makes an unprovable mathematical proposition true? I’m sure you wouldnt want to argue that the infinite task of ensconcing smaller axiomatic systems within more encompassing axiomatic systems involves a qualitative change of sense of meaning that prevents us from attributing all these systems to the same truth, and therefore one is not in fact dealing with an already defined infinity, but with a finite task whose sense is continually shifting . This would be Wittgenstein’s view, which i agree with. But I am guessing you would argue alongside Godel and Yanofsky that every iterative subsuming of axiomatic system within axiomatic system belongs to the same ‘truth’.

"This is what we observe" is in no way equivalent to "this is why we observe...." — Treatid

The ‘why’ is bound up with the qualitative structure of the theory which explains and organizes the observation. As one theoretical explanation is overthrown for another, the ‘why’ changes along with it.

Do you think the Hard Problem has been solved?
— RogueAI
It's a pseudo-problem .Scientifically, I think, embodied cognition explains much better the phenomenal subject (e.g. T. Metzinger, R.S. Bakker, A. Damasio, D. Dennett) than phenomenology itself does. — 180 Proof

The only problem with that is you have the wrong theorists in mind. 4ea ( embodied, enactive, extended , embedded and affective cognition) is a melding of phenomenology, hermeneutics and cognitive science. I’d hardly call Metzinger and Dennett embodied cognitivists. Try Shaun Gallagher , Francisco Varela , Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Thomas Fuchs, Dan Zahavi , Hanne De Jaegher and Jan Slaby instead.

. This is an abstract, Platonic reality and not the physical reality, but regardless, truth is still based on correspondence — Tarskian

Could you provide your own critique of Platonic explanations of the mathematics, lie that of Goedel, or the correspondence theory of truth? This might shed more light on where you think Wittgenstein went wrong.

g. The other’s ‘stuckness’ only provokes our anger when it involves their deliberate, intentional choice...
— Joshs

Sure, but I am not sure that you are appreciating the relation of choice to free will. To deny the ability to do otherwise is to deny choice and fault, and the onus is on you to show how a deterministic paradigm could provide for the ability to do otherwise. — Leontiskos

I’m all for free will. My claims about determinism weren’t an attempt to privilege them over freedom-based positions, but to show that they share a limitation with many such approaches. What most free will based perspectives have in common with deterministic ones is making fault and blame a necessary consequence of choice and freedom, the latter simply displacing the focal point of freedom to a ‘pre-subjective’ domain. I believe we are free, within the looose constraints set by our contingent schemes of understanding, to reconstrue the meaning of events. Determinations of culpability, fault and blame tend to prematurely end that process of re-interpretation and questioning.

You do at least appreciate that a system that can compute at a vastly higher rate than us on endless tasks will beat us to the finish line though — I like sushi

The AI doesnt know what a finish line is in relation to other potential games , only we know that. That knowledge allows us to abandon the game when it no longer suits our purposes. AI doesn’t know why it is important to get to the finish line , what it means to do so in relation to overarching goals that themselves are changed by reaching the finish line, and how reaching the goal means different things to different people. It doesn’t realize that the essence of progress in human knowing involves continually changing the game , and with it the criterion of ‘finish line’. Any AI we invent is stuck within the same game, even though it uses statistical randomness to adjust its strategy.

True, we provide the tasks. What we do not do is tell it HOW to complete the tasks — I like sushi

Yes, we do tell it how to complete the tasks. The statistical randomness we program into it involves the choice of a particular method of generating such randomness. In other words, we invent the method by which it can ‘surprise’ us.
When we opt for a different method, it will surprise us according to that new method. The bottom like is that if the surprising behavior of a machine depends on a method that we concoct, then it is only limited novelty within a predictable frame. Any system which is expert at belching out endless variations of a theme will be left in the dust when we decide on a better, more useful theme.

Again, there is nothing in logic that does not let you do this. Logic is a tool. You can be meticulous with it, or generic. Noting that people are not very meticulous in their logic does not mean the tool can't be meticulous. I understand your point, because many people do not use logic in such a way. But it doesn't mean it can't. — Philosophim

There are many different varieties of logic. For instance, Husserl distinguishes between formal and transcendental
logic. Transcendental logic burrows beneath the presuppositions of formal logic to reveal its genesis and fundamental meaning. Propositional logic can’t reveal its own basis because it begins too late. Treatid says the fundamental basis of meaning is not the object as self-identical substance with attributes and properties , but relations. I would say that the fundamental basis of experience is not simply relations but change in relations, a new constituting or constructing of sense. Formal logic requires stasis and identity as its ground, and attempts to build relationality on top of this.

As Heidegger states:

“In philosophy propositions never get firmed up into a proof. This is the case, not only because there are no top propositions from which others could be deduced, but because here what is "true" is not a "proposition" at all and also not simply that about which a proposition makes a statement. All "proof" presupposes that the one who understands-as he comes, via representation, before the content of a proposition remains unchanged as he enacts the interconnection of representations for the sake of proof. And only the "result" of the deduced proof can demand a changed way of representing or rather a representing of what was unnoticed up until now. By contrast, in philosophical knowing a transformation of the man who understands takes place with the very first step.

I disagree; blame is attendant upon the idea that the person really could have done otherwise; it is based on a libertarian notion of free will which is entrenched in the western psyche
— Janus

We get angry and blame when we believe we can get that person ‘unstuck’
— Joshs

I'd say Janus is clearly correct here, and the key is not some vague notion of libertarian free will, but rather his condition "that the person really could have done otherwise." Joshs needs to put "blame" in scare-quotes, for by 'blame' he seems to mean nothing more than negative conditioning — Leontiskos

No, the point I was making is that believers in reductive determinism like Sapolski are not some strange anomaly within the history of philosophy, deviating from both defenders of traditional free will and postmodernists like Derrida and Heidegger in denying that blame is attendant upon the idea that the person really could have done otherwise. (Heidegger writes that Dasein is primordially guilty. “Existing, Da-sein is its ground, that is, in such a way that it under­stands itself in terms of possibilities and, thus understanding itself, is thrown being. But this means that, as a potentiality-of-being, it always stands in one possibility or another; it is constantly not other possibilities and has relinquished them in its existentiell project.”)

‘Could have done otherwise’ is alive and well in Sapolski, but is hidden within the way he understands natural cause. As far as the association of blame with negative conditioning, I have always sided with those within psychology and philosophy who have strongly critiqued behaviorist notions. For instance, my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, argues that what motivates behavior is not reinforcement of drives but the ability to make sense of one’s world by effectively anticipating events.

“In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event… When we place a construction of our own upon a situation, and then pursue its
implications to the point of expecting something to happen, we issue a little invitation to nature to intervene in our personal experience. Even when events are reconciled with a construction, we cannot be sure that they have proved it true. There are always other constructions, and there is the lurking likelihood that some of them will turn out to be better. The best we can ever do is project our anticipations with frank uncertainty and observe the outcomes in terms in which we have a bit more confidence. But neither anticipation nor outcome is ever a matter of absolute certainty from the dark in which we mortals crouch.

anger has a great deal to do with blame, but it is simply false to claim that we get angry when we think we can get a person unstuck. We get angry with someone when they have done something wrong, and our anger is supposed to motivate them to set it right. If someone is "stuck" but is not to blame for anything then we do not get angry with them. — Leontiskos

That was the point I was making. The other’s ‘stuckness’ only provokes our anger when it involves their deliberate, intentional choice to fall away from an intimacy of relationship with us, a falling away from trust, empathy, loyalty, etc.

AGI will effectively out perform every individual human being on the planet. A single researchers years work could be done by AGI in a day. AGi will be tasked with improving its own efficiency and thus its computational power will surpass even further what any human is capable of (it already does).

The problem is AGI is potentially like a snowball rolling down a hill. There will be a point where we cannot stop its processes because we simply will not fathom them. A sentient intelligence would be better as we would at least have a chance of reasoning with it, or it could communicate down to our level. — I like sushi

Computation is not thought. Thinking involves creative self-transformation, which our inventions are not capable of. It is true that current AI is capable of performing in surprising and unpredictable ways, and this will become more and more true as the technology continues to evolve. But how are we to understand the basis and nature of this seeming unpredictability and creative novelty shown to us by our current machines? How does it compare with novelty on the scales of evolutionary biology and human cultural history? Lets examine how new and more cognitively advanced lines of organisms evolve biologically from older ones, and how new, more cognitively complex human cultures evolve through semiotic-linguistic transmission from older ones. In each case there is a kind of ‘cutting edge' that acts as substrate for new modifications. In other words , there is a continuity underlying innovative breaks and leaps on both the biological and cultural levels.

Can we locate a comparable continuity between humans and machines? They are not our biological offspring, and they are not linguistic-semiotic members of our culture. Many of today's technology enthusiasts agree that current machines are nothing but a random concatenation of physical parts without humans around to interact with, maintain and interpret what these machines do. In other words , they are only machines when we do things with them. Those same enthusiasts, however, believe that eventually humans will develop super intelligent machines which will have such capabilities as an autonomy of goal-directness, an ability to fool us, and ways of functioning that become alien to us. The question is, how do we arrive at the point where a super intelligence becomes embodied, survives and maintains itself independently of our assistance? And more importantly, how does this super intelligence get to the point where it represents the semiotic-linguistic cultural cutting edge? Put differently , how do our machines get from where they are now to a status beyond human cultural evolution? And where are they now? Our technologies never have represented the cutting edge of our thinking. They are always a few step behind the leading edge of thought.

For instance, mainstream computer technology is the manifestation of philosophical ideas that are two hundred years old. Far from being a cultural vanguard, technology brings up the rear in any cultural era . So how do the slightly moldy cultural ideas that make their way into the latest and most advanced machines we build magically take on a life of their own such that they begin to function as a cutting edge rather than as a parasitic , applied form of knowledge? Because an AI isn't simply a concatenation of functions, it is designed on the basis of an overarching theoretical framework, and that framework is itself a manifestation of an even more superordinate cultural framework. So the machine itself is just a subordinate element in a hierarchically organized set of frameworks within frameworks that express an era of cultural knowledge. How does the subordinate element we call a machine come to engulf this hierarchy of knowledge frameworks outside of it, and making it possible to exist?

And it would not even be accurate to say that an AI instantiation represents a subordinate element of the framework of cultural knowledge. A set of ideas in a human engineer designing the AI represents a subordinate element of living knowledge within the whole framework of human cultural understanding. The machine represents what the engineer already knows; that is, what is already recorded and instantiated in a physical device. The fact that the device can act in ways that surprise humans doesn't negate this fact that the device , with all its tricks and seeming dynamism, is in the final analysis no more than a kind of record of extant knowledge. Even the fact that it surprises us is built into the knowledge that went into its design.

I will go so far as to say that any particular instantiation of AI is like a painting, a poem or movie that we experience repeatedly, in spite of the illusion it gives of producing continual creative dynamism and partial autonomy. The only true creativity involved with the actual functioning of a particular machine is when humans either interpret its meaning or physically modify it. Otherwise it is just a complexly organized archive with lots of moving parts. When we repeatedly use a particular instantiation of AI, it is akin to watching a movie over and over. Just like with a machine , a team of people designs and builds the movie. When the movie is completed and its inventors sit down to watch it, they discover all sorts of aspects that they hadn't experienced when designing it. This discovery is akin to AI engineers' discovery of unpredictable behavior evinced by the AI that was not foreseen during its design phase. Any machine, even the simplest, reveals new characteristics in the behavior of the actualized, physical product as compared with the design blueprint. Each time the movie is watched or the AI is used, new unforeseen elements emerge, Every time one listens to a great piece of music, that same piece contributes somthing utterly new. This interpretive creativity on the part of the user of the invented product is the preparatory stage for the creation of a fresh artistic or technological statement, a new and improved movie or AI.

Why is the complex behavior of current AI not itself creative, apart from the user's interpretation? Because the potential range of unpredictable behaviors on the part of the machines are anticipated in a general sense, that is, are encompassed by the designer's framework of understanding. Designing a chaotic fractal system, a random number generator, mathematically describing the random behavior of molecules, these schemes anticipate that the particulars of the behavior of the actual system they describe will evade precise deterministic capture. Industrial age machines represented a linear, sequential notion of temporality and objective physicalism, complementing representational approaches to art and literature.

Today's AI is an expression of the concept of non-linear recursivity, and will eventually embrace a subject-object semantic relativism. Current AI thus ‘partners' with newer forms of artistic expression that recognize the reciprocal relation between subject and object and embed that recognition into the idea the artwork conveys. And just like these forms of artistic expression, non-linear, recursive AI functions as an archive, snapshot, recorded product, an idea of self-transforming change frozen in time. In dealing with entities that contribute to our cultural evolution, as long as we retain the concept of invention and machine we will continue to be interacting with an archive, a snapshot of our thinking at a point in time, rather than a living self-organizing system. In the final analysis the most seemingly ‘autonomous' AI is nothing but a moving piece of artwork with a time-stamp of who created it and when. In sum, I am defining true intelligence as a continually self-transforming ecological system that creates cultural (or biological) worldviews (norms, schemes, frames), constantly alters the meaning of that frame as variations on an ongoing theme (continues to be the same differently), and overthrows old frames in favor of new ones. The concept of an invented machine, by contrast, is not a true intelligence, since it is not a self-modifying frame but only a frozen archive of the frame at a given moment in time.

Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone rather than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways of thinking about what intelligence means. In other words, they treat the archival snapshot of technological cultural knowledge that current AI represents as if it were the creative evolution of intelligence that only human ecological semio-linguistic development is capable of. Only when we engineer already living systems will we be dealing with intelligent, that is, non-archival entities, beings that dynamically create and move through new frames of cognition. When we breed, domesticate and genetically engineer animals or wetware, we are adding human invention on top of what is already an autonomous, intelligent ecological system , or ecological subsystem. And even when we achieve that transition from inventing machines to modifying living systems, that organic wetware will never surpass us for the same reason that the animals we interact with will never surpass us. As our own intelligence evolves, we understand other animals in more and more complex ways. In a similar way, the intelligence of our engineered wetware will evolve in parallel with ours.

No, that's just a poor use of logic. A good use of logic would be to include all the variables involved, and that includes the particular context. As a very basic example, we can say the context of whether its raining or not today — Philosophim

When I talk about change in context, I dont mean going from ‘its raining’ to ‘its not raining’, but the subtle qualitative changes in sense of meaning of ‘it’s raining’ that take place over time while remaining within the logical category of ‘its raining’. In going from subject to predicate and back to subject again in a propositional statement, the variables that are collected together to form a propositional chain dont retain a fixed meaning as we move back and forth between them to build up a logical statement. A living sense-making system isnt just designed to adapt to a changing world, its own functioning modifies the meaning of the world it finds itself engaged with, even if that world consists simply of letter symbols connected by logical operators.

Just to make sure I follow you here. You make three distinctions:
1. Sense data
2. Epistemic meaning
3. Conceptual schemes

Correct? — Fire Ologist

Pretty much

Logic does not require a full understanding of the underlying process. Assume A. If A is true... is all you need. We're not asking where A came from. The structure of A, its history, etc. We're assuming A exists. In this instance, "A program called Excel exists with these functions. If I use function B, I get output C." While one could operate Excel at an extremely basic level by someone giving them formulas and telling them to just plug the same numbers in again and again, logically they know using a different formula will lead to an unknown result. Our use of logic does not need to build Mt Olympus, sometimes its used to build a card board box house. — Philosophim

The problem with formal logic, or I should say its limitation, is that it ignores changes in contextual sense. A word concept in logic is defined in opposition to everything else in the world indiscriminately, but concepts as we understand them are contrasted in a context and person-dependent way with what they are not. The contrast pole
for a word meaning may be different for you than for me. The more important limitation is that, while we build our computers to calculate by logical symbol manipulation, this doesn’t mean that this is the fundamental or most useful way that we think. Formal logic is a peculiar invention that has its uses, but falls short in addressing how we form and use meanings in everyday situations , and what causes breakdowns in interpersonal understanding.

I would also argue we should hope for a conscious system rather than some abstraction that we have no hope to communicate with. A non-conscious free-wheeling system that vastly surpasses human intelligence is a scary prospect if we have no direct line to communication with it (in any human intelligible sense) — I like sushi

Even though there are many things we don’t understand about how other organism function, we don’t seem to have any problem getting along with other animals, and they are vastly more capable than any AGI. More important is the way in which living organisms are more capable than our machines. Living systems are self-organizing ecological systems, which means that they continually produce creative changes in themselves , and thus in their world. AGI, like all human-produced machines, is an appendage of our ecological system. Appendages don’t produce novelty, only the larger system which they are a part (us) can produce novelty. They can only produce statistical randomness , a faux-novelty. There is no more risk of my agi suddenly running off and becoming independently sentient than there is of my left hand or liver doing so. The ethical danger isn’t from our machines, it is from our ways of engaging with each other as reflected in how we interact with our machines.

But seeing beyond what can be seen, beyond the arbitrary faux limits of what men think can be, is what separates the philosopher, the rightful ruler, whose proclamations or "truths" that are not based on so-called rationale propped up by inorganic states of detestable action, a dynamic of perpetual hypocrisy to simply maintain but a foothold in the mind of man instead of a persistent truth intrinsic to men rich and poor and even in infancy can recognize, the True Sovereign, from the commoner. Being alive, or open, knowing "statistically" (based on the view of the majority or "what is apparently, if not glaringly, seemingly-evident") is but a transient state of affairs that can be turned on its head in a moment's notice. — Outlander

I like your thinking here. It reminds me of my favorite psychologist, George Kelly:

“…when we sit down to try to figure out what will happen in the future, it usually seems as if the thing to do is to start with what we already know. This progression from the known to the unknown is characteristic of logical thought, and it probably accounts for the fact that logical thinking has so often proved itself to be an obstacle to intellectual progress. It is a device for perpetuating the assumptions of the past. Perhaps at the root of this kind of thinking is the conviction that ultimate truth -at least some solid bits of it - is something embedded in our personal experience. While this is not the view I want to endorse, neither would I care to spend much time quarreling with it. It does occur to me, however, that one of the reasons for thinking this way is our common preference for certainty over meaning; we would rather know some things for sure, even though they don't shed much light on what is going on.

To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition. It is true that a person so caught up in the tide of circumstances, or so committed to the control of them, can scarcely be accredited as an unbiased observer. But, from the standpoint of constructive alternativism, the issue is not bias versus unbias, but the question of what the bias is
and how long it takes to see things in a new light.