Comments

  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)

    In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. . . .

    However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
    George Washington's Farewell Address (1796)

    If this does not describe the current political climate, I don't know what does.
  • Hinton (father of AI) explains why AI is sentient
    Dawkins also popularised the idea that "memes" (a term that he coined) tend to propagate in proportion to their fitness. Ideas being useful no doubt enhances their "reproductive" fitness. But this concept of memes analogises memes to parasites. What enhances the fitness of a meme needs not enhance the fitness of the individuals who host it anymore than real parasites enhance the fitness of the animals that they infect. Else, they would be symbiotes rather than parasites. One main weakness of the "meme" idea as a way to explain cultural evolution is that human beings aren't passive hosts of memes who pass them on blindly. Cultural practices and common forms of behavior are being refined intelligently by people who reflect about them and adapt them to their specific circumstances. An idea that is useful for me to enact in my own circumstances might be useless or harmful for others to enact in their different circumstances. Practical reason isn't a process whereby one gets infected by the memes within a common pool of ideas that have proven to be the most useful in general. Again, practical rational deliberation about one's particular circumstances and opportunities might indeed involve intelligently adapting the means to pursue a predetermined end, but it can also involve revising those very ends regardless of the effects pursuing them might have on one's biological fitness (or reproductive success).Pierre-Normand
    This isn't much different than how various species have re-purposed certain traits (think of the ostrich's wings), or re-purposing a chair as a weapon.

    New traits can only evolve from existing traits. New ideas can only evolve from prior ideas. New ideas are an amalgam of prior ideas.

    An idea that is useful for you in a circumstance would also be useful for others in similar circumstances. Some birds can use their wings to fly in the air or fly through the water. They are different environments but depending on the trait or idea, it would be useful in similar environments.

    Is every situation the same? No, and that is not my point. My point is that every situation is similar, in some way, to another. The point is do the differences really matter in this particular instance of using some idea, or are they irrelevant?
  • p and "I think p"
    Yes, what some term a priori cognition under empirical conditions. Nevertheless I can’t think a possible cat a priori without having the antecedent experience, in order to reduce the possibility to a particular object. Otherwise, I have no warrant for representing the conception with the word “cat”.Mww

    I wasn't talking about terms or words (scribbles). I was talking about the visual of a cat in your mind - the cat that you think of when thinking of cats. Maybe when thinking of cats you might think of different types of cats if you had the experience viewing various cats, but then what was it about those different cats that allowed you to place them all under the umbrella of cat (not the term, but the image)? Your imagined visuals of cats somehow allows you to recognize actual cats by the way they appear in your mind compared to how they appear in the world. Language (scribbles) is not needed to recognize similar objects to predict their behavior. It seems to me that you have to be able to categorize similar visuals and sounds together prior to learning a language as you have to be able to discern the differences and similarities between scribbles and sounds to learn a language in the first place.

    how would you recognize a cat that is different than the one in front of you…..
    — Harry Hindu

    Isn’t that just another possible cat? As far as my cognitive operation is concerned, it is.
    Mww
    That wasn't my question. How would you categorize an animal you have not seen before but looks like an animal you have seen before? What key characteristics do they share to then place them in the same visual category?

    Doesn’t matter that an in abstracto object in general is represented by a universal idea, it isn’t a cat until I cognize that thing as such.Mww
    What is that process like? What goes on in your mind to cognize some thing if it does not include an abstract object?

    It seems to me that your mental object of cat is the very cat you first experienced until you've experienced other cats in which your mental object changes to leave out certain characteristics and retain others. For instance, cats can have long or short hair. If your first cat you observed had short hair and you saw a similar looking animal but it had long hair, why or why would you not cognize that thing as a cat?

    ….we can never get at the world as it is independent of us, only at the relation itself.
    — Harry Hindu

    Close enough, but given relations alone is insufficient for knowledge.
    Mww
    Knowledge is itself a relation. If everything is a relation then it would it be fair to say that getting at relations is getting at the world?
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    Is there an ontological relation between mind and world? Is there an ontological relation between different thoughts?

    Can it be said that each sentence you wrote above is the cause of the following sentence? Is each letter the cause of the following letter you typed, or each word the cause of the following word in each sentence?
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    I think it's safer to assume that whatever filth one side is accusing the other of, the accusing side is guilty of too.Tzeentch
    Exactly. The problem isn't one party or the other. The problem is both parties.

    Abolish political parties. Abolish group-think and group-hate.
  • Hinton (father of AI) explains why AI is sentient
    Evolutionary explanations of the origin the general traits and intellectual abilities of human beings contribute to explaining why those traits and abilities arose on (long) phylogenetic timescales but often are irrelevant to explaining why individual human beings behave in this or that way in specific circumstances, of why specific cultural practices arise within this or that society. I disagree that circumstances of resource scarcity always, or even generally, lead people to act under the instinctual impulses that favor individual fitness.Pierre-Normand
    This could be said for any organism with an array of senses that responds in real-time to immediate changes in the environment. The world as a dynamic set of patterns is a selective pressure that enables brains that are more adaptable to changing environments to be the prominent mental trait. Instincts can only take you so far as they are more like general purpose behaviors. Consciousness allows one to fine tune one's behaviors for multiple environments by learning which behaviors work in certain situations and which do not.

    Cultural practices, language, and views of the world are themselves subject to natural selection, as humans are natural outcomes and part of the environment and are selective pressures themselves. New ideas are "mutated" former ideas, or an amalgam of former ideas, and those ideas that are more useful tend to stand the test of time.
  • p and "I think p"
    No. Representations are not for universals, which are objects of reason, concepts without representation. We don’t think all possible cats; we think either the one right in front of us, or the one that might be.Mww
    One that might be is the same as a possible cat. If you can only think of the cat in front of you or one that might be, how would you recognize a cat that is different than the one in front of you and the one you imagine might be, if the universal does not represent all possible cats?

    What purpose is a universal? How are they used in our thinking, if not to stand for the characteristics of a cat?

    Isn't the primary purpose of thinking to simulate the world as accurately as possible?Harry Hindu
    Nothing wrong with that, but specifically I rather think the primary empirical purpose of thinking is to understand the world’s relation to us, the way we are affected by it. Bu empirical thinking is not the limit of thought, so technically, the primary purpose depends on the domain in which object thought about, is found.Mww
    Sounds like we're saying the same thing. To simulate the world as accurately as possible includes the world's relation to us and how we are affected by it, as we are part of the world. The mind is a relation between body and world so one might even say that all we can never get at the world as it is independent of us, only at the relation itself.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    Nothing of that has anything to do with numbers. Why is this such a controversial idea to you, that you feel the need to discuss it so passionately? I see it as utterly mundane, it's like talking about what number you're going to bet at the lottery, there's not much to it in terms of metaphysics or ontology.Arcane Sandwich
    You brought up the rules of chess as a separate example to numbers, so if chess has nothing to do with numbers, that's your problem, not mine. Why is it so difficult for you to focus?

    Look. With all due respect. I see that you're an educated gentleman, and I've been acting a bit like a clown in my responses to you. But this thread is called "is the number 1 the cause of the number 2?" Now I ask you, sincerely: do you actually think that the answer to this question is yes? Do you really believe that? Or are you just wanting to have a verbal sparring session with me because you find it entertaining in some way?Arcane Sandwich
    I actually believe it because it is observable and provable. I have provided many examples where ideas have a causal relation with the rest of the world. Are you saying that thoughts and ideas and your mind is not part of the world? Or are you saying that the mind is an illusion? If the latter, then all you have done is pull the rug out from under your own position because everything you ever learned is via your mind, including information about brains and what they do. You also seem woefully uninformed of other possible views and explanations of the theory of mind and the observer effect.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    Does the Merriam Webster dictionary have the final word in matters of first-order predicate logic and the ontology of fictional entities in general, and of mathematical objects in particular? That sounds like they have the Foundations of Mathematics all figured out then. I wonder why professional mathematicians don't read the Merriam Webster dictionary more often. I will contact them and I will tell them to read it.Arcane Sandwich
    Are you saying you have the final word on the nature of existence? Are you saying that the matter of the ontology of existence has been settled?

    I don't think so: https://iep.utm.edu/existenc/
    "It is not easy to characterize what existence as a first-order property is."

    The most likely problem to occur here is that we end up talking past ourselves.

    But ideas are fictions. They're just brain processes. We pretend that they have some sort of autonomous existence, but they don't. Do the rules of chess exist as ideas, with causal efficacy, in your view?Arcane Sandwich
    Not every idea is a fiction. Everything is a process. Non-fictional ideas "are just brain processes too". The difference is their relationship with the world, and what kinds of things you can accomplish by implementing them. Do you successfully get your starship to Mars, do you dress up in a way that others successfully recognize you as Santa Claus?

    Does your idea of how to play chess permit you to play chess? Does it not have a causal effect on whether you get disqualified from the chess match or not?

    But Santa Claus is a fictional character. He doesn't exist. Real people just pretend to be him, just like a professional actor pretends to be a character. Batman doesn't really exist, he's just a character played by different actors (i.e., Adam West, Christian Bale, etc.)Arcane Sandwich
    But how could real people act like someone that does not exist, or does not have some sort of causal efficacy? How did they come to dress and act like that in the first place?
  • p and "I think p"
    Thank you for your replies, but am now off on holiday.

    Perhaps deflationary towards truth. As the SEP article on Truth writes

    One long-standing trend in the discussion of truth is to insist that truth really does not carry metaphysical significance at all. It does not, as it has no significance on its own. A number of different ideas have been advanced along these lines, under the general heading of deflationism.
    RussellA
    According to the deflationary theory of truth, to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. For example, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary theory, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    So something is true simply by saying it? What happens when someone else says, "Snow White isn't white"? Can contradictory statements be true? If every statement is true simply by saying it that seems to deflate the meaning of truth to meaninglessness.

    How is defining truth as a correspondence between some proposition and its usefulness in achieving some goal any different?

    If one were to say, "Snow White is white", and another say the opposite, we verify the truth of the statements by using them to achieve some goal. If we succeed, the statement is true, if we fail, the statement is false.


    In my vision there is a postbox, which I know because it exists in my mind. I believe that there is something outside my mind that caused me to see a postbox in my mind, but I don't know what that something is.

    The correspondence theory of truth doesn't apply, as there is no correspondence between a known thing in my mind and an unknown thing in the world.
    RussellA
    But you just said that something outside your mind caused you to see a postbox in your mind, how is that not a correspondence - a link of causation?
  • p and "I think p"
    That’s not what we’re doing. Ok, fine. I reject that’s what I’m doing. I’m processing an extent understanding given from experience, subsequently the possibility of expressing it coherently.Mww
    Would you say you are simulating expressing it coherently, essentially thinking what you are going to say before saying it?

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expression
    Expressing is the act of representing or symbolizing something else.

    In expressing something are you not using some form of representation? Are the sounds coming from your mouth representing, or referring to your simulation (thinking it before saying it), or to some other thought that is neither the thought of you expressing it nor the sound you are making. When expressing something to me, what exactly are you trying to express - more words, or some other type of sensory experience?

    We don’t think in representations, but by means of them in their relation to each other. I’m not getting a third-person out of that.Mww
    So when you think of the image of a cat, that is not a representation of all possible cats? Isn't the primary purpose of thinking to simulate the world as accurately as possible? What type of relation exists between your mind and the world?
  • p and "I think p"
    "Think" exists in my mind as an imagined sound.RussellA

    Then you are talking to yourself when thinking? What are you talking to yourself ABOUT? Do the imagined sounds in your mind represent other things that are not sounds in your mind? If so, couldn't you just think in those things instead of thinking only sounds in your mind?

    "Think" exists in my mind in its own right, and doesn't refer to anything else.RussellA
    So the act of thinking is only the act of hearing the sound "think" in your mind?

    If "think" in my mind didn't exist in its own right, and referred to something else, such as "A", then this "A" must refer to something else, such as "B", ending up as the infinite regress homunculus problem. As I see it, I am my thoughts rather than I have thoughts.

    Therefore things in my mind must exist in the own right without referring to anything else.
    RussellA
    Then I don't understand how you can be an indirect realist that asserts that your thoughts are not the world, but about the world. You are describing solipsist stance, not an indirect realist one.

    When I see the word "think" on the screen I hear the sound "think" in my mind. After many repetitions, in Hume's terms, this sets up a constant conjunction between seeing the word "think" and hearing the word "think". Thereafter, when I see the word "think" I instinctively hear the word "think", and when I hear the word "think" I instinctively see the word "think".

    The sound "think" doesn't refer to the image "think", but corresponds with it.
    RussellA
    You're saying that the act, or process, of thinking is simply seeing those scribbles and hearing that sound in your head. For you, the scribble and the sound do not refer to anything, like the act of thinking.
  • p and "I think p"
    There are many definitions of "truth" (SEP - Truth)

    My favourite is a correspondence between something that exists in the mind and something that exists in the world, such that "the oak tree is shedding its leaves" is true IFF the oak tree is shedding its leaves.

    Unfortunately, being an Indirect Realist, I don't think we can ever know what exists in the world, meaning that we can never know "the truth".

    What you want seems to be similar to the Anti-Realist approach to truth, such as Dummett's, where truth is not a fully objective matter independent of us, but is something that can be verified or asserted by us. (SEP - Truth - 4.2).
    RussellA
    You say that your favorite version of "truth" is one where you can never know what the "truth" is. :meh:


    How is your version independent of us if it is a correspondence between something that exist in the world and something that exists in the mind? :roll:
  • p and "I think p"
    I don't know how to answer the question, because I don't know the difference between the way I can think and the way I think. If there are different ways a person can think, do we each choose different ways at different times? Or do we each have just one that, for whatever reason, we settled on, perhaps very early in life?Patterner
    I don't know either. You were the one that used the phrase "the way we think" and I was just going with the flow. I assumed you knew what you were talking about when using those words.

    What did you mean when you said that language changes the way we think?

    I assumed that "ways we think" include things like problem-solving, reason, logic, representation, categorizing, interpreting, recalling, etc.

    It seems to me that we must already possess these ways of thinking to be able to learn a language in the first place and learning a language is like learning to ride a bike. When you master the skill, you outsource some of the work to unconscious processes. You no longer need to focus on balance and the movement of your legs. It is all done unconsciously. Mastering language is the same. Once you master the skill you outsource some of the processes to your non-conscious parts of your brain, so it makes you more efficient in riding your bike and using your language. While language does not change the way we think. It represents the way we think and improves the efficiency in our thinking.

    My focus has been on things and types of things we think about, not the way we think. Thinking about an object, say, a boulder on a hill, and thinking about what that boulder might do in the future, say, roll down the hill, are different kinds of thoughts. Thinking about that boulder landing on me leads to thinking about my mortality, which is yet another kind of thought. Thinking about these different kinds of thoughts Is a fourth kind of thought. At least it seems this way to me.

    But I don't know that I'm not thinking these different kinds of thoughts in the same way. If they are different ways of thinking, I guess they are the thingd that might answer your question? But what are those ways?
    Patterner
    Do you need language to think those things, or is language merely representative of your thinking in images, sounds, feelings, etc.? When thinking about a boulder on a hill and the possibility that it might roll down the hill, are you experiencing that thought as the visual of scribbles, "That boulder might roll down the hill.", the sound of your voice saying "That boulder might roll down the hill.", or visuals of the boulder and it rolling down the hill? If you say you experience hearing the sound of your voice saying that, then does the sound of your voice refer to the visual of the boulder rolling down the hill, or is the boulder rolling down the hill just sounds in your head?
  • p and "I think p"
    Pretty open-ended question, isn’t it? Within the context I was talking about, though, there isn’t any third-person to be found, the very notion is absurd.Mww
    Could we say that one can simulate one view within another? Can we simulate a third person view from the first person?

    The view belonging to the subject, yet without the pitiful nonsense of Cartesian theater, right?Mww
    I'm not sure. It seems that the very idea of a "view" is what invokes the nonsense of a Cartesian theater and homunculus.

    What about when we talk to ourselves in our head? Who are we talking to? If language is representation and we think in language, what does that say about which view we are participating in when thinking in a language rather thinking in images, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells? In thinking in representations are we not relegating ourselves to the third person?
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    Numbers are fictions, without existing as fictions.Arcane Sandwich
    Look up the definition of "be" and you will see the definition is "exist". :roll:
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
    2.a.
    : to have an objective existence : have reality or actuality

    I find it much easier and simpler (Occam's Razor and all that) to simply say that numbers exist as ideas, and to assert that numbers exist as anything other than ideas is a category mistake. The same goes for Santa Claus. Santa is an idea and to assert that Santa is anything more than an idea is making a category mistake.
  • p and "I think p"
    What I meant was that while language does change what we can think, it does not change the way we think. It is merely representative of the way we already think. You should try to answer the question I just posed to you in what ways of thinking are required for you to learn a language in the first place and that might help resolve the contradiction and provide a better explanation of what I am getting at.
  • p and "I think p"
    At first, I was ok with Rödl’s initial premises; each published philosopher has his own. But later on, came to object to the development of them.

    I mean…

    “…. What is thought first-personally contains its being thought….” (Pg 2)

    ….what does that say except thought is what is thought; IS thought and BEING thought are exactly the same thing; was there ever a thought that wasn’t first-personal? Watahell’s a guy supposed to do with any of that?

    Ehhhh…probably just me, too dense to unpack what’s being said.
    Mww
    What is the difference between first and third person anyway? It seems to me that you are always stuck in one view and the other view is simply changing what it is you are attending to in your mind - the world or yourself? What does it mean to be self-conscious - the act of talking to yourself in your head?

    What forms do your thoughts take? If you hear your own voice talking to yourself, is that a first or third person view - hearing the sound of your voice in your mind? Is the sound of your voice all there is to your thoughts?

    I agree that all these exist in the mind "I", "think" and "p".RussellA
    But what forms do they take in your mind? How do you know they exist in your mind? Are "I", "think" and "p" just scribbles and that is the form they take in your mind, or do the scribbles refer to other things that are not scribbles and those are what exist in your mind? In seeing these scribbles on the screen, are the same as what is in your mind?
  • p and "I think p"
    It seems to me learning language played a pretty big role in his ability to think in ways he could not before.Patterner
    As I have said, learning anything can play a role in your ability to think in ways you did not before. Language is not special in this regard. After you learned a language, did you stop learning anything? Have you not learned new things since you learned a language that changed your ability to think in ways you did not before?

    I am not saying that language does not change the way you think. I'm saying that there is nothing special about language in this regard. Making any observation, whether it be watching the behavior of birds, or reading about the behavior of birds, changes the way you think about birds, and I would argue that directly observing birds is better than than reading about them in a book.

    At this point I think you should provide examples of how language changed the way you think in ways you did not before. What ways of thinking do you need to be able to learn a language in the first place?
  • p and "I think p"
    Are you saying that if we start with a preconceived notion of the truth, and this is supported by observations, then this shows that our preconceived notion of the truth was correct.

    The problem becomes when we only use those observations that agree with our preconceived notion of the truth and reject any observation that doesn't.
    RussellA

    You said,
    I agree, observations and reasoning are important.

    Plato’s explanation of knowledge as justified true belief has stood for thousands of years.

    The question is, which justified beliefs are true.

    Problem one is that there is no one definition of truth, and problem two is that, even if there was, how would we know what the truth was.
    RussellA
    ...which I understand to mean that the word, "truth" is meaningless if we could never know when we know the truth and when we don't.

    I'm trying to redefine "truth" in a way that is meaningful in that maybe truth is not a relation between some state of the world and our ideas of the world. Instead "truth" can be thought of as a relation between some idea and the success or failure of some goal.
  • p and "I think p"
    I wonder if Ildefonso now thinks in ways he could not before he learned language. I'll have to think about that.Patterner
    Sure he thinks in ways he could not before. He now understands that there are ideas can be shared. Can't it be said that you change when you learn anything new? Again, you seem to be trying to make a special, unwarranted case for scribbles.

    But even if language did not make him think in ways that he already could not, it certainly made him think in ways he had not. One day, I saw a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I'm a Bach freak, and Escher is great, so, despite never having heard of Gödel, I thought I'd see what it was about. I had never heard of Zeno's or Russell's paradoxes before I found GEB. We know everything we know because, at some point in our lives, we're exposed to them for the first time. My first exposure to these paradoxes came from reading a book. Because of the scribbles. One guy scribbled on paper, and, decades later, by looking at those scribbles, someone else is thinking in ways he never had before.Patterner
    Exactly. It wasn't language that made you think differently. It was the ideas in a book expressed in language that changed your thinking. The ideas could have been expressed in any form as long as there were rules that we agreed upon for interpreting the forms, and as long as you had a mind capable of already understanding multiple levels of representation.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    And I'm using real-world counter-examples to prove that they don't.Arcane Sandwich
    Any example you use proves my point, not yours, as how could you be here in this thread proving the existence of something that you claim has no causal efficacy? What caused you to type out the scribbles, "numbers", "1", "2", etc. if the idea of numbers has no causal efficacy? Do you even understand the mind-body problem?

    Numbers are fictions, and no fictions have causal efficacy. If you want to say that all fictions are brain processes and that as such, they have causal efficacy, then I would say that you're failing to distinguish numbers as fictions and brain processes as facts.Arcane Sandwich
    Santa Claus is a fiction yet look at all the images of Santa Claus and people dressed like Santa Claus during the holidays. What caused them to dress like that and to create images in Santa's likeness if Santa does not exist?

    What else could explain their behaviour? A lot of things. Atoms, for example. Contemporary physics might explain it. You don't need numbers in your ontology to begin with.Arcane Sandwich
    Yet physics is based on mathematics. :roll:

    Well, I'm not going to make your case for you, I don't see how an ontology with numbers that have causal efficacy is better than an ontology in which that is not the case.Arcane Sandwich
    Understanding that mind and body are causally linked helps to get past the mind-body problem.

    A useful fiction in the Nietzschean sense, which is ultimately a brain process.Arcane Sandwich
    What does it mean for something to be useful if it has no causal efficacy?

    Numbers don't exist as fictions, they exist as brain processes.Arcane Sandwich
    You are contradicting yourself (and in the same post):
    Numbers are fictions, and no fictions have causal efficacyArcane Sandwich

    Because other things have the causal efficacy that you're referring to: the cells of my body, the chemicals that I am made from, the subatomic particles that compose me.Arcane Sandwich
    Yet you cannot explain how ideas cause you to behave in certain ways. If I told you a lie (a fiction) to manipulate you into behaving a certain way then the fiction had a causal effect on your behavior.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    How so? Numbers are not the sort of entities that have causal efficacy. That was my point, irony notwithstanding.Arcane Sandwich
    Saying so doesn't make it so. I'm using real-world examples to prove my point that numbers do have causal efficacy. Numbers are ideas and ideas have causal efficacy, as I have shown using many real-world examples - your wife's behavior at the number of oranges you purchased, your behavior caused by the number of pills you took, and a SpaceX Starship on a launch pad blasting off into space. Another example is behavior caused by hallucinations and delusions. What else could explain their behavior except that they are hallucinating - having false ideas.

    It was a poor example, that's all I'm saying.Arcane Sandwich
    You're not playing along with better examples.

    But a scribble is not a number. The scribble "2" is a numeral, not a number.Arcane Sandwich
    Then what is a number? A requirement of existence is that it has causal efficacy. Is a number the very scribble, "number"? If not, then what does the scribble, "number" refer to? How is it that you are here talking about numbers if numbers have no causal efficacy?
  • p and "I think p"
    I agree, observations and reasoning are important.

    Plato’s explanation of knowledge as justified true belief has stood for thousands of years.

    The question is, which justified beliefs are true.

    Problem one is that there is no one definition of truth, and problem two is that, even if there was, how would we know what the truth was.
    RussellA
    If we link the truth to our goals does that resolve the problem? The information we use to accomplish some goal is true. The information we use that causes us to fail in our goals is false.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    A number caused my wife to become angry at me? It seems like I should have a talk with that number, and I should tell it to stop making my wife angry at me. And then I should have a talk with my wife, and I should tell her that I'm talking to the number that made her angry, so that it doesn't make her angry anymore.Arcane Sandwich

    A number caused my anger towards my doctor? It seems like I'm not a very reasonable person myself. I should probably apologize to my doctor. I will tell him that a number caused me to become angry at him.Arcane Sandwich
    Straw-men.

    Doesn't seem like a very good test if I have to calculate something so basic like one plus one.Arcane Sandwich
    Not the point.

    What do I think will happen? Given those circumstances in the present moment? I don't know. Maybe I'll get a phone call from my doctor. Maybe my wife interrupts me, because she wants me to buy some fruit. A lot of things could happen in those circumstances.Arcane Sandwich
    Moving the goal posts. You've given a new set of circumstances.

    What caused me to write a scribble? I don't know, I guess my brain is what caused it.Arcane Sandwich
    Ok. What caused your brain to do that if not the visual of scribbles (numbers and operator symbols) and a goal to pass a test?

    You typically want to think beyond the first thought that comes to mind when responding to posts on a philosophy forum.
  • p and "I think p"
    In general, the more observations the better one's conclusion ought to be. However, in practice, most people are entrenched in their positions, regardless of how many new observations they make.

    Even so, this does not take away from the fact that observations cannot be guaranteed to be trustworthy, as anyone reading mainstream media would testify.

    However, this doesn't mean that certainty cannot be discovered from uncertainty. Zero-knowledge proof is an interesting concept, and not only in computer sciences.
    RussellA
    As I have already explained, observation alone does not constitute knowledge. It is observations coupled with reasoning that constitutes knowledge. It was not just multiple observations that led you to be more certain in your beliefs. It is both multiple observations and the logical categorization and interpretation of those observations that constitutes knowledge.
  • p and "I think p"
    Is it? Can we "adequately convey the subjective experience" of a hand that hurts in the first person, with "my hand hurts", more effectively than in the third, "@RussellA's hand hurts"?

    Is that what Wayfarer was claiming? What more is in the first person account than in the third person account?
    Banno
    If scribble/utterance-use is conveying first-person experiences in the third person, then what does it mean to use scribbles/utterances in your mind to refer to the experience of pain which is in inherently first-person? If thoughts consist of scribbles/utterances then thoughts are inherently third-person not first-person.

    Does using representation inherently put one in the third-person stance relative to what is being represented?
  • p and "I think p"
    Will you, ChatGPT?

    No, I will never know what it is like to have a sore hand. I can analyze and convey the meaning of "my hand hurts" based on linguistic and logical structures, but I lack subjective experience and the capacity for first-person awareness, which are necessary to truly feel or know pain. This distinction underscores the unique nature of first-person experience, as discussed in your thread.
    — ChatGPT
    Wayfarer

    You also don't have hands, ChatGPT. I think that is the more important qualifier here because there is still a question what a subjective experience is and why a solid hunk of neurons can have subjective experiences but computers cannot.
  • p and "I think p"
    Ok. Well, Human languages are much more complex than any non-human language that we are aware of. With them, we can discuss things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language. Things that are not thought by any non-human.

    Humans created systems using scribbles in order to make lasting records of ideas that can be expressed in those languages. Presumably, the motivation for creating such systems was the desire to communicate those utterances, both to distant people and to future generations. The squiggles can record and communicate relatively simple things that can be communicated in non-human languages, and also things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language.

    The result being, when we look at the scribbles, we can, and very often must, think things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language, and which are not thought by any non-human. Also, they are often things the one looking at the scribbles has never thought before.

    I don't know what's not logically possible in any of that. And I don't know how any power can be read into any of it. At least not in the magical/fantasy sense that I believe you mean it.

    But these scribbles are signs that can pass extremely complex ideas, in great detail, from the mind of one person into the mind of a person living thousands of years later, who never had any inking of those particular ideas, or kinds of ideas. That's pretty darned special.
    Patterner
    As I have already pointed out, it is simply the sheer number of symbols being used, along with the sheer number of relations between the scribbles (letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, etc.) that makes language complex. But you must already be able to think in multiple layers of representation, and the memory to store the number of scribbles and their associated rules to be able to understand language use and how to use it yourself.

    Pictures say a thousand words. So if I can substitute words with pictures, would that make a difference?

    Our ancestors drew cave art. When our ancestors drew a mammoth on the cave wall, did they attempt to throw their spears at the picture, cook and eat it? No. They understood that the picture represents the mammoth they successfully hunted during the day. Instead of a picture of the mammoth, they could have drawn scribbles representing the mammoth and the hunt, but isn't it that the scribbles really point to the visual of the mammoth and the memories of the hunt? Language merely provides another layer of representation for the purpose of communicating ideas that a listener or speaker does not have access to the picture or the experience. Language does not make us think in ways that we already could not. Language use is itself a representation of the structure of our thoughts, not the other way around. For instance, the pictures on the cave will inform the women that did not participate in the hunt what happened during the hunt.
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    It sounds like my wife isn't a very reasonable person if she gets mad about some fruit that I forgot to buy. Not sure if I can conclude something about the ontology of numbers and their causal efficacy (or lack of it) from my wife's anger.Arcane Sandwich
    Again, it wasn't the fruit you bought that made her angry. It was the number of fruit.

    Would you be angry at your doctor if they instructed you to take two pills at bedtime when you were only suppose to take one and you have some severe side effects? Again, its not the pills themselves. It was the number of pills that caused the severe side effects and your anger to towards your doctor.


    Here's another example:
    Say you're taking a math test. Say you have a goal to pass the test. You see your first math problem:
    1.) 1 + 1 = _

    Given your present goal to pass the test and your knowledge of what the scribbles on the paper mean, what event do you think would happen next given these set of circumstances in the present moment? I predict that you will draw a scribble, "2" in the blank space. What caused you to write the scribble if not your present goal and the knowledge of what is suppose to go in the blank space if not some idea of numbers?
  • p and "I think p"
    This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent.

    My hunch is that the dominance of computational theory of mind and computational theories of reason/rationality are sort of the culprit here, since they can be taken to imply that everything, all of consciousness, is really just symbols and rules for shuffling them. Logic gets demoted to computation in this way too, and on some views the whole of physics as well.

    I'm not saying these theories don't get something right, but they seem inadequate, and might be misleading when it comes to language, meaning, perception, etc. It doesn't seem they can all be right, for if pancomputationalism in physics is right, the saying the brain works by being a computer as CTM does explains nothing, because everything "is a computer."

    Of course, when stream engines were the hot new technology the universe and the body was said to work like a great engine, and while this wasn't entirely wrong, it also doesn't seem to have been particularly accurate.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    If this reality is a simulation, then it is possible that everything is a computer.

    Steven Pinker addresses this:
    Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has
    solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer
    revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided
    psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda.

    Generations of thinkers have banged their heads against the problem
    of how mind can interact with matter. As Jerry Fodor has put it, "Self-pity
    can make one weep, as can onions." How can our intangible beliefs,
    desires, images, plans, and goals reflect the world around us and pull the
    levers by which we, in turn, shape the world?

    ...along came computers: fairy-free, fully exorcised hunks of
    metal that could not be explained without the full lexicon of mentalistic
    taboo words. "Why isn't my computer printing?" "Because the program
    doesn't know you replaced your dot-matrix printer with a laser printer. It
    still thinks it is talking to the dot-matrix and is trying to print the document
    by asking the printer to acknowledge its message. But the printer
    doesn't understand the message; it's ignoring it because it expects its input
    to begin with '%!' The program refuses to give up control while it polls the
    printer, so you have to get the attention of the monitor so that it can wrest
    control back from the program. Once the program learns what printer is
    connected to it, they can communicate." The more complex the system
    and the more expert the users, the more their technical conversation
    sounds like the plot of a soap opera.

    Behaviorist philosophers would insist that this is all just loose talk.
    The machines aren't really understanding or trying anything, they
    would say; the observers are just being careless in their choice of
    words and are in danger of being seduced into grave conceptual
    errors. Now, what is wrong with this picture? The philosophers are
    accusing the computer scientists of fuzzy thinking? A computer is the
    most legalistic, persnickety, hard-nosed, unforgiving demander of
    precision and explicitness in the universe. From the accusation you'd
    think it was the befuddled computer scientists who call a philosopher
    when their computer stops working rather than the other way around.
    A better explanation is that computation has finally demystified mentalistic
    terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal
    inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions
    triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a
    goal.
    — Steven Pinker

    It's not that everything is a computer. It's that everything is logical, and there are patterns anywhere you care to look, some of which might be to small, to big, to fast or to slow for us to perceive. But only brains that think logically and can discern patterns would be the types of brains selected to survive and procreate.
  • p and "I think p"
    I don't know what you mean by power. I can't imagine anything about them I'd use that word for.Patterner
    It's a term I'm using to refer to your idea that scribbles can somehow do more than what is logically possible. You are free to use a different term to refer to this idea of yours.
  • Hinton (father of AI) explains why AI is sentient
    I really like that. In the article the guy says, with regard to a goal, intelligence is "what you do when you don't know what to do."frank
    I don't think contradictions are helpful definitions. Intelligence is the act of bringing together unrelated knowns together to come up with a new, useable known to achieve some goal. New ideas are always an amalgam of existing ones.

    Humans are sensitive to reasons for abstaining for doing things that would enhance their evolutionary fitness when this evolutionary "goal" conflicts with our values, loyalties, etc.Pierre-Normand
    Sure, when resources are plentiful your goal becomes survival in a social environment, but when resources are scarce, values, loyalties, etc. are thrown out the window in favor of other goals.

    As Jerry Coyne put it,
    "Remember that the currency of selection is not really survival, but successful
    reproduction. Having a fancy tail or a seductive song doesn’t help you survive, but may increase your chances of having offspring—and that’s how these flamboyant traits and behaviors arose. Darwin was the first to recognize this trade-off, and coined the name for the type of selection responsible for sexually dimorphic features: sexual selection. Sexual selection is simply selection that increases an individual’s chance of getting a mate. It’s really just a subset of natural selection, but one that deserves its own chapter because of the unique way it operates and the seemingly nonadaptive adaptations it produces.
    — Jerry Coyne
    I would argue again that if resources are plentiful and the environment is stable, traits like the peacock's tail can evolve. If not, procreation is the last thing on the organism's mind. It takes intelligence to find food or a mate. It takes intelligence to navigate one's environment either natural or social (I would say that social is part of the natural. Everything we do is natural, but that is not saying that what is natural is good or bad. It's just a statement of fact, not a moral statement).
  • Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
    No, numbers do not have causal efficacy. They are not efficient causes, in any sense of the term.Arcane Sandwich
    Of course they do. If your wife tells you to get three oranges at the store and you come back home with
    only two, that will cause your wife to be angry. It wasn't the type of fruit, or the oranges themselves that caused the wife to get angry. It was the number of oranges that made the wife angry. Ideas have just as much causal power as a baseball bat and baseball. If you disagree then try explaining what caused SpaceX's Starship to exist if not caused by some ideas in someone's head.

    Presumably "exist" is referring to existing in the world rather than existing in the mind.RussellA
    Exist refers to anything that has causal power. As such, minds are just as causal as anything else in the world. Why do you insist on separating your mind from the world? That just causes all sorts of problems.

    Without 1, 2 could not exist, though the reverse doesn’t hold. Since it is because of the existence of 1, or one thing, that there can be 2, or two things, then the former can be said to be the cause of the latter.

    Does this hold? Surely this argument has been made plenty times before, no?
    Pretty
    I would say that the idea of 1 and the idea of counting causes the idea of 2. Effects always have at least two causes, never just one. Things change as a result of interactions, meaning at least two things need to interact to create a new effect. One does not necessarily cause two without counting.
  • p and "I think p"
    It seems that you start off disagreeing with me, and end up agreeing. Certainly, our ancestors used things other than words to symbolize other things. We still do. But words and language is a huge step above anything else when it comes to communicating specifics, and let's us think about things I doubt think we could think about without it.Patterner
    Sure, because of the sheer number of scribbles and rules for putting them together in strings, not because of some special power of the scribbles have apart from representing things that are not scribbles. When communicating specifics, do the scribbles invoke more scribbles in your mind, or things that are not just more scribbles, but things the scribbles represent? To represent specifics you must already be able to discern the specifics the scribbles represent. Do the names of new colors for crayons create those colors, or do they refer to colors that we can already discern?

    I agree. But if you don't find a way to store sign language outside of memory, like in writing, you won't get as far in some ways.Patterner
    Sure, but we could use anything to store information, not just scribbles on paper, which is arguably perishable. We could hammer marks in a rock and come up with arbitrary rules for interpreting the marks on the rock.

    It's making similar sounding words in succession.Patterner
    And words are just scribbles and sounds. What does a language you don't know look and sound like?
  • p and "I think p"
    Things participate in the world by interacting, as the old scholastic adage goes actio sequitur esse, "act follows on being."Count Timothy von Icarus
    :up: When science describes "physical" objects as being the interaction of ever smaller objects, we never get to anything actually physical - only interactions or relations. It's all relational.
  • p and "I think p"
    I know that I think the moon exists regardless of whether I can prove or verify that I know that I think the moon exists.RussellA
    Haven't you proven that you know that you think the moon exists by expressing as much here on this forum? I mean, you just wrote, "I know that I think the moon exists". How did those scribbles get on this screen in the correct order for other English speakers to read and understand as such, if you don't not only know what you think, but also know how to use a computer?

    You might say that you could be an AI bot submitting these posts, but then I would simply ask, what does it mean to know that you think something and be able to provide proof for? Again, what is it like for you to prove to yourself that you know you think some things? Your thoughts are just as "external" to me as the moon is and you said, "I could prove "the moon exists", as the moon exists external to me," yet make some unwarranted special case for your thoughts that are external to me. How can we prove the moon exists when it is external to us, but not your thoughts if both are part of the same shared world?
  • p and "I think p"
    On the one hand I saw Santa Claus in person at Hamley's Regent Street store when I was very young, yet have never seen Barak Obama. On the other hand, many people have told me that Santa Claus is not real.

    Do I believe what I have seen with my own eyes, or what people tell me?
    RussellA
    Isn't that the question? If "I think...." is inherent in every thought including the perception and recognition of an oak tree and its behavior of shedding leaves, and "I think..." also inherently expresses uncertainty, then which sensory impression can you have a higher degree of certainty of?

    Do you still believe that the person you saw when you were young is Santa Claus? Why or why not? It seems that you can only ever change your knowledge is by making more observations that you seem to be saying that you cannot trust, so how can you ever say that you learn anything? What does it mean to you to learn something, or to learn from a mistake?

    The Direct Realist believes that there is a book on the table. However, the Indirect Realist would disagree.RussellA
    Why? What does the "Realist" mean in "Indirect Realist"? It seems to me that the only difference between a direct and indirect realist is the complexity of the causal path from between object and percept, but they both still get at what the object is - a book.

    I think the direct vs. indirect debate is a false dichotomy. If I am neither a direct or indirect realist (I'm just a deterministic realist monist) then how is it that we have been able to agree on our use of scribbles on this screen to the point where we have been able to carry on a meaningful conversation? You must agree that there are scribbles on the screen, or else please explain what it is you are doing when reading this page and formulating a response and submitting it.

    The problem is, how is it possible to know about something that exists in a mind-independent world when all we have is our minds.RussellA
    That's a problem of dualism. The mind is not independent of the world. It is firmly implanted in the world. This is not to say that the world is mind-like (idealism). It is to say that the nature of the mind is no different than the nature of everything else. The world is not physical or mental. It is relational, informational, processual.

    The same effect can have many different possible causes. I see a broken window, and even if I know that something caused the window to break, one particular effect can have many different causes. There is no certain means of knowing what the cause was, a stone the previous day, a rock the previous week, a seagull the previous week, a crow within the hour, a window cleaner, etc.

    The cause may determine the effect, but the affect could have been determined by many different possible causes.
    RussellA
    Then I'm sure you are living in fear of the authorities arriving at your door to arrest you for a crime you claim you did not commit (as your uncertainty cannot explain how it is you arrived where you are in the present and cannot account for where you were earlier) and the authorities may have been wrong in determining the causes of a crime (the identity of the criminal, etc.). You keep talking about uncertainty but you don't seem uncertain in what you are saying, in your perception of scribbles on this screen and what they mean, how to use a computer, etc. You keep asserting that you can only ever be uncertain of what your senses are telling you yet you exhibit certainty in what they are telling you. There must be some set of rules you are using to determine what you can be more certain about than uncertain. What are those rules?

    You're contradicting yourself again. First you define knowledge as "justified true belief". You then say that you can justify your belief, but then say you cannot know things-in-themselves.
    — Harry Hindu

    From SEP The analysis of knowledge
    The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified true belief”.Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its starting-point.

    From Wikipedia Thing-in-itself
    In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation.
    RussellA
    You have also said that truth is a relation between the state of the world and the mental representation in ones mind. If knowledge is justified TRUE belief, then how is it that you are not getting at the thing-in-itself via one's justified true belief?

    Given the level of uncertainty you have expressed, you must even be uncertain that you actually are not getting at the thing-in-itself. When pouring a glass of water, do you make a mess and any water that actually makes it into the glass is accidental? Are you not aware of the dimensions of the glass and its relation to the pitcher you are pouring from? If I were to observer you interact with your environment would it seem to me that you are perceiving the environment as it is, or would I think you to be blind, deaf and dumb? I think you are assuming to much that things are more complex than they are, or that there is more to things that what you can represent in your mind, when there isn't. You are assuming that there are things that exist that you cannot prove either way. Your version of indirect realism seems to be more like solipsism, as your level of skepticism shows that you have no ground to stand on to support your idea that there is even a mind-independent world.

    That is my point. What is important are our senses and our reason. What exists the other side of our sense is open to debate.RussellA
    This makes no sense because you have done nothing but question your senses and reason. All you do when you question your senses and reason to such an unhealthy degree is that you end up pulling the rug out from under your own positions you have established using your senses and reason.

    How to get from what we experience in our senses to what exists the other side of our senses, and whether it is even possible, has no agreed solution.RussellA
    Yet we have agreed on the use of scribbles on this screen. You're just contradicting yourself at this point.
  • Hinton (father of AI) explains why AI is sentient

    I think Steven Pinker's response when asked what intelligence is is applicable here:
    I think intelligence is the ability to use knowledge to attain goals. That is, we tend to attribute intelligence to a system when it can do multiple things, multiple steps or alternative pathways to achieving the same outcome: what it wants. I’m sitting here right now in William James Hall, and my favorite characterization comes from William James himself, the namesake of my building, where he said, “‘You look at Romeo pursuing Juliet, and you look at a bunch of iron filings pursuing a magnet, you might say, ‘Oh, same thing.’ There’s a big difference. Namely, if you put a card between the magnet and filings, then the filings stick to the card; if you put a wall between Romeo and Juliet, they don’t have their lips idiotically attached to opposite sides of the wall.” Romeo will find a way of jumping over the wall or around the wall or knocking down the wall in order to touch Juliet’s lips.’ So, with a nonintelligence system, like physical objects, the path is fixed and whether it reaches some destination is just accidental or coincidental. With an intelligent agent, the goal is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely. That’s my favorite characterization of intelligence. — Steven Pinker

    Now, a determinist might say that the path is also fixed and making a distinction between the causal power of "non-physical" knowledge and "physical" objects would be a false dichotomy - a product of dualism. So a more intelligent system would be one that takes more complex paths to reach some goal, or a more complex causal sequence to reach some effect where a less intelligent system would take simpler paths to reach some goal or effect.

    One might say that the ultimate goal is survival and every other goal is a subgoal. Our lives are a path to survival until we ultimately fail.
  • Hinton (father of AI) explains why AI is sentient
    I think you're pretty much nailing the important points from the definition I'm getting out of this article. Intelligence is about problem solving, especially finding solution to problems one has never seen before.frank
    Has natural selection solved problems of survival using unique bodies and behaviors that fill specialized niches in the environment? Now I do not see natural selection as an intended, or goal-directed process, even though it can appear like it is. Natural selections solves problems, but unintentionally. Would the presence of intention, or goals, need to be present as a qualifier for intelligence? Intelligence would include the process of maintaining an end goal in the mind in the face of present obstacles (sub-goals).
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