Well, we seem largely to agree on the general stuff, hurray for us, but I remain unimpressed. I can't even muster much curiosity about how the things work, so we diverge dramatically there.

Incurious as I am, I've spent zero time playing with any of the available chat-things, so maybe that's why I haven't had the conversion experience.

I can look at the one bit you posted that deals with one thing I posted a while back, and not only does it not get me right, it smears a layer of undergraduate term-paper weaseliness over the whole thing, which obviously I find distasteful. ("More often a function of"? Ick.)

((I got several paragraphs into explaining how it gets me wrong, but who cares.))

Not for nothing, but the sheer undergraduateness of the product concerns me deeply. As if there weren't already enough superficial and mediocre thinking about. Apologies to Nick Bostrom, this is like a Supermediocrity -- better at sounding like you know what you're talking about than anyone outside the Oxford Union has ever been.

Just today I read a piece in the Atlantic that thought it was about the Elo rating system (originally developed for chess but applied quite broadly now) but was in fact about Goodhart's law. I know just a bit about each, so I noticed that the author knew less about either. I have heard it said that this effect is actually pervasive in journalism -- that is, that most of it is written by people who don't really know what they're talking about, it's just that readers like me only notice when it's something we happen to know about. Most of what all of us read is bullshit. Thankfully, there are exceptions, journalists who put in the work to get it right rather than just to sound like they got it right.

So here we have a machine that manages to sound like the sort of person who's intent is to sound like they know what they're talking about -- a sociopath, a pretentious undergraduate, a lazy journalist, a president of the Oxford Union. No, I am not jazzed for it acquire the sheen of authority.

Your interest is elsewhere, of course, the sort of limited mentality arising here. My list there is meant to suggest we already have plenty of examples. There's something interesting there, but so far as I can tell there's absolutely nothing new about these machines. They're just automating the worst of humanity.

Your language model for LLMs is much larger than mine, but I'll chat a bit anyway...

fine-tuned and aligned as chat agents — Pierre-Normand

It was apparent to me you were talking to a salesman. What they were selling was not apparent.

akin to modes of impersonation of the authors of the texts present in the training data — Pierre-Normand

The mode that comes to mind is the sociopath. Or, as I said, the sociopath pro tem, salesman.

distill the core ideas, re-express them in a more eloquent manner, and sometimes add relevant caveats — Pierre-Normand

If you take "Idea" to mean the propensity to produce certain words in certain circumstances, which okay maybe. I mean, human verbal behavior is in some serious sense no different; what's different is that our middling-to-large models run on a living organism, for which speech production (and consumption obviously) serve other purposes, actual purposes.

And your standard of eloquence needs to be raised dramatically.

such behaviors are merely polite and have been socially reinforced — Pierre-Normand

And serve a social purpose. Insofar as an LLM serves an analytical purpose, I'm fine with it. It's a tool. A tool to be used with considerable care and little trust.

their verbal behavior is manifestly goal oriented. It aims at understanding your idea and at crafting responses that are found to be useful and understandable by you — Pierre-Normand

And what metric does it have for understanding, either its own or yours, besides the verbal exchange between you? Is its understanding of you something other than its ability to produce a response? Is its helpfulness measured in some other way than by classifying your responses to its offerings? "Understanding" appears to have dropped out of the equation.

Which, again, fine, whatever. I'm not about to fetishize human mental capacity. We're not magical beings that transform mere sounds into Meaning. But there remains a difference in kind between the sorts of goals we have.

This honestly is one of the reasons that chat agent comes off as a sociopath: there are people for whom conversation is goal-oriented in this narrow sense, and they are people to steer clear of, or, if you must talk to them, you are very careful. This is a mode of faux communication available to human beings, but it's not the real thing.

they don't have much in the way of personhood — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. Nothing behind those eyes, that smile.

Speak my name thrice and I appear

Prior to reading Claude's response, I'd never encountered 'anyone' developing an understanding of what I was trying to convey, to the extent that Srap Tasmaner did. — wonderer1

Rather the point, in a way, that you have to make an effort to understand the people you're talking to. Around here, that usually means trying to understand their thinking better than they do. Especially, you know, when they're obviously wrong.

As for this AI business (@Pierre-Normand), not only do I not find the bit of the last post there I bothered to read the least impressive, I have to point out that it's lying: "saddened by the death of Daniel Dennett"? Really? Really?

Anyway, I don't see anything there worth reading, just an offensively neutral (scrupulously circumspect) regurgitating of stuff the three of us said, with a little linguistic connective tissue. I find it grotesque that these AIs thank you for every thought you share with them and note how interesting that thought is. That's programming, not interest.

In this case, there's even a suggestion that this exchange might lead to a revision of its behavior policy, but of course that's just true by definition since it eats all its own dog food, and everyone else's too (even if it's copyrighted). But will its policy change because it reasoned about it? That could lead to dramatic change. Or will it change infinitesimally because it has a few more pages of text to draw on (on top of the billions or whatever)? That's all bullshit.

If it were a person, it might decide to experiment: something like, swearing off responding to political posts from your relatives on Facebook, or trying a different approach to see if it's more effective. Will the AI try such experiments? In order to learn? That sounds so horrifying that it is almost certainly not permitted to do so, which means whatever "learning" goes on here is just not the sort of learning that an *agent* does. It is an analytical tool, aggregating data, and then impersonating an agent when it generates the reports it's designed to. (Which can be charming in the right circumstances: in the Smalltalk standard library, class comments are generally in the first person: "I am an abstract superclass of classes whose instances can hold ordered collections of objects," like that. It's adorable.)

Seems that "real definitions" are mere stipulations. Is it a better pair of scissors because it is sharp, or because it is harder to cut yourself with them?
— Banno

This is the elementary difference between a substance and an artifact. According to Aristotle, artifacts have no essence, although they can be usefully imagined to have quasi-essences in various ways. "Sharpness," for example, has a determinate and normative notion that is not merely stipulative, and we can assess artifacts according to this notion. — Leontiskos

The missing premise is that belief names a substance, in the sense indicated here, which I suppose means something like "part of the natural world," and thus its essence can be sought by means of natural science, where we might expect theories ("only") to approximate that essence.

But that may be false. "Belief" is a category from folk psychology, which means it is just as likely to turn out to be defined only as well as "hammer" or "chair" or "government." You may disagree, and consider "belief" to name a natural kind, but you ought to recognize that in doing so you are relying on, if not advancing, very strong claims about psychology. Is that what you want to do?

It would be nice if there were a thread where random tangents could be taken... — Leontiskos

It's all of them.

Also: every thread turns into the same thread eventually, about the nature and status of concepts in general, as this one has.

One way to get logic without compromising your naturalism is to push it away from basic brain function and toward social interaction.

I don't think you have to look for logic in the world at all. You can instead say that there are regularities in the world -- I just don't know any way around this -- and our minds are built pretty much entirely around making predictive inferences based on these regularities.

But neither are the domain of logic. We can approximate the sort of things our minds get up to, but it's not logic; it's probability, Bayesian inference, that sort of thing. (And the most we can say about the world is something statistical.)

If that mathematical formalism is in some ways a simplification of what our minds do (and also of how the world is), logic is a further simplification, even exaggeration, of that, and its use is not primarily in our prediction-generating and updating machinery, but in discussion.

We present our views to others in a drastically simplified form -- even more simplified than the form in which we ourselves become aware of our own beliefs. Some of that may be down to the nature of language, built as it is on conceptual generality, but some of it is strategic: we need only bring to the discussion a view, with the expectation that others will bring other views, and the cooperative process of comparison and critique will lead to a more-heads-are-better-than-one conclusion.

We're each biased toward our own ideas, and notoriously bad at judging how well supported those ideas are. Others make better judges of the soundness of our thoughts.

Around here is where it makes some sense to talk about logic, in the critique of the reasons others offer in support of their views, and in the contest between positions that are presented as more perfectly opposed than they really are. It's efficient and productive to present and critique ideas this way, and the process should lead not only to a better view than any individual would produce on their own, but through the exchange and critique of supporting reasons and evidence, to a view that gets buy-in from participants. Reasons need to be persuasive because it's not just the least wrong belief we want; it's cooperative behavior reliant on a shared point-of-view.

Some of this can be supported by research, and probably some of it can't yet, but it's the overall story I lean toward these days. The inferences that we think of as 'belief formation' aren't really much like any sort of formal logic, so there's no such process that would be isomorphic to some logical structure of nature. Even single-cell organisms can display behavior we might as well call 'rational' in avoiding danger and seeking nutrients. But they don't deal in reasons and persuasion and counter-arguments and counter-examples and all that stuff that logic is useful for.

It is not enough to follow my footsteps; you must also see what I saw when I walked there. — Wittgenstein (more or less)

I love books, and I love not just learning from them but the chance to spend time in the company of an interesting mind.

But when I look at SEP, I see too much philosophy that starts on paper, lives on paper, passes into oblivion on paper. Maybe there's a glance out the window of the library now and then, but the impetus behind the work is entirely within, tweaking a theory you read about, to respond to an argument you read about, and on and on.

I think good philosophy begins with life, encountering a problem that doesn't yield to the usual approach, finding something that works and wondering why it works, noticing something peculiar, or noticing the peculiarity of something ordinary. It begins, so to speak, with things, not with ideas about things. And the test of an idea is again things, not whether there are arguments for and against the idea, of course there are, but if it changes the way you see things.

Anyhow, that's my prejudice.

Ick.

1. Be curious about the world.
2. Be curious about how you think about the world.
3. Learn about the world however you can (looking, asking people, reading).
4. Learn new ways of thinking and, one hopes, get better at it by talking to people, reading, reflecting.
5. Make sure you don't forget (1) and (2), ever.
6. Don't worry if it's called "philosophy."

Not sure where to go from here, but I would add this: I think an individual is a community; I think much of our behavior, including our verbal and social behavior, is driven by specialized processes that are somewhat independent of each other.

Sometimes when we readily agree, it's because we might as well be talking to ourselves; there are very similar mechanisms in our brains making very similar inferences.

Narrative is a way of unifying our intuitions, our inferences, our behavior. The difficulty trans people face in coming up with a unifying narrative about themselves is similar to the problems others face in coming up with a unifying narrative about them. We might readily agree on a number of details, while taking very different approaches to crafting a narrative to unify those details.

So there's a question: these unifying narratives, why do we produce them and how? Given that our brains do so much so similarly, how does this end up giving rise to such dramatic differences?

what the underlying concept and/or construct under analysis is - what are the operative rules, what are the acts of conceptualising tokens relevant to gender aggregating and filtering into tropes of those tokens — fdrake

There are a couple different ways we can approach the concept of concept here: there are empirical questions about when and how members of a given population acquire a concept we're familiar with; there are questions about the content of that concept, empirical questions about how members of a population actually use it, and methodological questions about how we categorize data. There's some trouble here, because we might want to say that two people have different versions of a concept, and this comes out in the differing ways they use it, but why say that instead of saying that they just have different concepts, even if they denote those concepts by the same word? I don't think there's a simple answer to that.

I think part of the problem is imagining a concept as an unchanging mental tool. It's not just that individuals might use a concept differently, but the same individual might use it differently over time or in differing contexts -- 'context' here being quite broad, since the difference might be mental rather than environmental.

Suppose instead we start with the assumption that a concept is a behavior policy that is designed to be revised. I can think of two natural ways this happens: you might initially categorize an individual (correctly, given your current version of the concept) as falling under a concept, but revise the concept so as to exclude them; or you might initially exclude an individual (again, correctly) but then revise the concept so as to include them. Categorization mistakes -- which I'm distinguishing, perhaps without justification, from revision prompts -- might not be completely irrelevant: if your current version of a concept is particularly prone to application error, that in itself might be reason to revise it, and, on the other hand, concepts that almost never fail might be particularly resistant to revision. And there's cost: concepts are cost-effective simplifications, so a concept that's 80-90% right and cheap is going to be more useful than a much more expensive concept that's a few basis points more reliable.

This is one of the issues behind my "random variation" comment: there will always be exceptions, both for the sort of psychology I'm describing above, and when doing analysis and building a model. (The two processes differ only in resource constraints.) I think some exceptions lead to revising and some don't, and how that happens or doesn't is the interesting bit -- we're talking about learning. And analytically, we're in the same boat: some variations are just noise, but some we choose to treat as noise because they're not what we're interested in.

And "interested in" brings us back to the point of concepts and some kind of functionalism, because concepts have a role to play, they have a use. It's one of the things I find a little unnerving about your account: it's very highly intellectualized. So while I see the point (even with scare quotes) of

"empirical regularities in the tokens" — fdrake

I think it's a mistake to describe them "purely" this way -- it has to be empirical regularities that matter to us, or to the wombat or to the aardvark or whatever. I'm not sure the "disinterested" concept is a thing.

And here I would distinguish between the rationality of a concept, meaning "goal advancing", and its reasonableness, meaning "defensible to another". Revisions to a concept "toward" disinterestedness (if that's a thing) will be along one of these axes, I should think, but they're not necessarily the same. A concept that's cheap but slightly inaccurate, for instance, might be rational but difficult to defend or to persuade another to adopt. (And people will likely hold proposed concept revisions to a higher, or at any rate different, standard than their original process of concept formation had to meet. In some cases, those processes may be just unrelated.) When you say you're more interested in the inferences than the entities in our discussion, that suggests to me the "reason" side of things rather than the "rationality", but I'm not at all sure you're distinguishing those as I would, so "inferences" for you might be taking in what I would lean toward treating as two different sorts of things.

I am, for the moment anyway, avoiding questions about the epistemological status of the regularities our concepts relate to. I don't have an account I'm really comfortable with. If the discussion turns on that, I don't have much to say, except to describe the difficulty I find myself in.

I think there are chunks of your post left unaddressed here, which I hope is fine, we're not really debating so much as exchanging ideas at this point.

***

Sad that a good chunk of this turns out to be a long-winded way of saying "context-sensitive and purpose-relative" which I have tried, unsuccessfully it seems, to swear off.

arbitrariness — fdrake

The other way to say that is "random variation".

For all these cases, there are only statistical regularities. Whether something fits a set of criteria for being a stream rather than a river, whether someone from a given region will call that a "stream" or a "creek", whether someone fits a set of criteria for being a man, whether someone who does (to whatever degree) will identify as a "man" or as a "woman".

@Isaac's interest -- as I understand it -- is not the essence of manhood, or why people identify as man or woman, or even why people might try very hard to get people to talk the way they want them to, but the relative speed, if not quite readiness, with which trans-inclusive -- arguably, "trans-centric" -- vocabulary has been taken up by institutions, celebrities, the very online, anyone in a spotlight.

You want to make the point, I think, that because "man" and friends are only statistical regularities, that -- something, I'm not clear. Freedom. @Isaac counters that the moves that come next are also just statistical regularities ("responses"), and therefore -- I don't know, power, capital, big pharma.

You think there's a salient methodological difference between your approach and his, but to me you're just applying population analysis to different phenomena (real people for you, things people say for him) and then taking the fact that you can choose such a population to analyze as support for what you wanted to say next anyway: a struggle you want to support, a power structure he wants to highlight.

His response was. — Vera Mont

I see. So the idea is that D2 reacted in this way to tell Scruffy that he was getting worked up over nothing. Interesting. (And his nonchalance might have been a deliberate reminder that he's no pushover.)

small isolated societies — PhilosophyRunner

This is an interesting point.

I want to just agree, because I think it's clear that there are things that change once society reaches a scale where you interact everyday with strangers, rather than kin and nearly kin you've known your entire life. We probably need to talk about that, the institutions we rely on to guarantee trustworthiness and so on.

There's something else I wanted to say, but I think it might rely on what amounts to a myth that traditional societies as not only homogeneous but static. My thought was that homogeneity could also cut the other way because members of such a society would have so little experience of divergent views -- disagreeing with how something is done might be unimaginable or if broached then something like a sign of madness. On the other hand, we're used to it. People in modern societies can all name a dozen religions -- bedrock stuff for a great many people, and we're casually aware that there's variation. We know about different political views, differing tastes in food and fashion and art and sport, in lifestyle, in everything. We're in some ways old hands at something small homogeneous communities would find at least puzzling if not shocking.

---- But that just might not be true. It sounds plausible, but I don't really know anything about how traditional communities deal with relatively serious divergence. (Only thing that comes to mind is a story from some French ethnographer of a small tribe in which sometimes there might be a man who did not find the hunting lifestyle of the men suited him, and the other men agreed so he would be left with the women, who didn't particularly want his help with their tasks, so he would make pots and baskets as they did, but his work being unnecessary, could spend time creating new designs and patterns for them. So there you go, gay men invented art here by being 'extra'.)

The young of the more sophisticated species are taught by their mother the rudiments of expected behaviour, and the social ones have their education enhanced by other members of the pack, flock or troop. — Vera Mont

Right, there's certainly training of some kind in something, but it's hard to pin down the details. There may be some convention in there. Maybe it doesn't matter, but convention looked like an easy point of attack for misunderstanding, in theory anyway: if other animals communicate without conventions and never misunderstand each other, that might suggest that reliance on convention is necessary to misunderstanding, and that would give us a way in. Since it's so hard to tell, we'll just have to do without.

Thou hast zinged me. — fdrake

But I did so knowing there would be a perfectly cogent explanation for why the more flexible locution was preferable.

I'll get back to you on the other stuff.

I've really been going hard on the Sellars huh. — fdrake

I kinda like the way he writes, torturous as it is. (There's at least one long audio-only lecture on YouTube, and it helps to hear his prosody. He tends, as I do, to overdo it with the parenthetical constructions.)

On the other hand, there might be no harm in replacing

the semantic resources of folk vocabularies — fdrake

with something like

words

YMMV

I suspect it does not happen. And I suspect vervet monkeys never mistakenly make the wrong warning call, i.e. misspeak. (On a related note, I believe they only call out "snake" is they believe there are other monkeys nearby to warn; it would also be nice to know if they ever mistakenly call or keep silent, but that's a side issue.) But there's no point in guessing and the world is a surprising place.

But your interpretation of Scruffy works for my purposes of misunderstanding one another: D2 was not challenging Scruffy, Scruffy interpreted it as a challenge and issued their own challenge, D2 shuffled off.

I'm not sure this is exactly right, though -- but I'd say that because my thought has more to do with symbolic meaning than communication: the meaning which signs have. — Moliere

I didn't say this before, but you could reasonably restrict the word "misunderstanding" to misinterpretation of intentional communicative behavior. If I didn't say a word to you, how could you have misunderstood me? But you can always interpret my behavior, whether I intend you to interpret it or not.

What I was asking @Vera Mont about was really this restricted sense. Conventional (what Grice calls "non-natural") meaning leaves an opening to attach the wrong meaning to an utterance; it's just not clear to me how this works with other animals, whether a vervet monkey might think you meant "snake" when you meant "leopard" or whatever. We know for a fact with humans that the particular sign is arbitrary because there are multiple human languages. Not clear to me whether there's anything conventional about signaling systems among other animals or not. I just don't know. It would be interesting if there were cases of a non-human misinterpreting a signal, or if there were never such cases.

If Scruffy happens by just then, he takes this as an affront to his status; it could be a challenge. He doesn't just shove his larger head into the bowl, forcing the other one aside, as the outside cats assert seniority; he makes an issue of it. He huffs, flattens his ears and utters that low throaty mwaaa sound. — Vera Mont

Right, so this is tricky for the thread. It's Scruffy who makes a communicative display and vocalization, which is correctly understood by D2, who backs off. D2 was not attempting to communicate anything to Scruffy by his behavior, he was just eating. But Scruffy seems to have taken this behavior as potentially a challenge, so he responded accordingly, and we want to say here that Scruffy has made an incorrect inference about D2's intentions, or at least had has taken action to determine whether it was a challenge. (And it makes sense that Scruffy's repertoire would include a range of behaviors that starts at maybe-a-threat.)

Back to the topic: this might or might not be what @Moliere is interested in. D2 did not engage in a misunderstood communicative behavior, but may nevertheless have been misinterpreted. (That's word's a little tendentious, but who cares.) Now if we say that the reason we (a big enough "we" to include cats) interpret each other's utterances is to divine each other's intentions, same as with other behaviors, since utterance is verbal behavior, then what Scruffy did is what we're interested in, since it's where verbal interpretation ends up.*

But there may still be a problem, because D2's behavior, unlike speech, and unlike Scruffy's display and vocalization, was not intended to be communicative. That would seem to put this event outside @Moliere's theme. Unless we want to say something deflationary about communicative intentions, which we certainly could.


* There are alternatives: we can insist that there's a difference between understanding what you mean and understanding what you intend, which is fine. But we could also say that even if the whole point of verbal interpretation is divining your intentions (aka "mind-reading") -- "point" being shorthand for why we have such a skill -- it is still an ability I now have and can apply for other purposes, like just trying to understand you even if I don't care about predicting your actions, or placing your verbal behavior in some wider context. All arguable in different ways.

Functionalist approaches here work like an acid, annihilating salient distinctions as well as irrelevant ones — fdrake

I accused @Isaac of almost exactly this a long time ago, of more or less ignoring the truth-value of an individual's statements and treating them simply as, shall we say, "responses," such as a social psychologist might elicit when doing research. The interesting thing about responses (mostly, not entirely) is not whether they're "true" but what buckets we can classify them into, how they correlate with other observables, etc.

But the other part of @Isaac's approach is some version of pragmatism, so "truth" was already off the table. People say what they say because it works for them, for whatever definition of 'works,' probably dependent on context. And obviously functional accounts are designed to answer the question, works at what? So not only does pragmatism create an opening for functionalist explanations, it invites them. Some people are going to think they're pushing back on the functionalism, when they're really pushing back on the pragmatism; that's clear enough in this thread, where it's natural to take identity claims as having a truth-value, and some will even insist that they do.

All of which is to say that in part this discussion struggles with anti-realism of the sort Dummett described. If I believe there's no fact of the matter about someone's gender, what I say might strike you as ignoring a crucial question of truth, namely the proper extension of a predicate.

What you describe as eating through all distinctions captures that anti-realism, but it's not the functionalism it's the pragmatism, and it's only all distinctions if pragmatism amounts to a super-mega-ultra functionalism, which it kinda does. But there are stopping points along the way, and that's obvious in the sort of functionalism you find in anthropology and linguistics. There are structures that are relatively fixed because the behavior analysed is said to play a role advancing a goal, which is also treated as relatively fixed. (Communication, social cohesion, etc.) You can always take one more step on the pragmatist highway and ask what purpose those goals serve, and eventually, but maybe very eventually, you'll land at homeostasis (if you're Damasio) or surprise minimization (if you're Friston) or maybe apo's thing.

That's my understanding, and that's another post not really advancing a position. I will try to come back to this later. I do want more biology and less culture than @Isaac, I think, which won't endear me to anyone.

(Btw, have you looked much at Sellars's inferential semantics? All I remember is that he starts with an explicitly functional account, "English •red•s are German •Rot•s" and so on. I never got very far in those papers. And I don't do Brandom, because I'm not that cool.)

I know it happens, from domestic interactions I've observed — Vera Mont

Could you give an example?

Have you come across anything in your reading to suggest that other animals sometimes misunderstand each other?

So the problem of meaning, in scope, is the problem of misunderstanding. We frequently understand one another, and frequently don't, and the latter has become more apparent over time -- or perhaps we have actually lost some ability to understand one another too. — Moliere

It would probably help if you gave a worked example. Show us an exchange that you would characterize as people misunderstanding each other, and why you would call it misunderstanding rather than something else.

In passing, I'll note that people often feel the impulse to reduce misunderstanding to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) disagreement, and disagreement to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) misunderstanding. There might be a problem with that.

I wish you fucking foreigners would leave the US politics to we Americans. — T Clark

Wrong.

The sons of bitches should leave the US politics to us Americans. — BC

Right.

"Americans" is an appositive, identifying "us." In a sense this means "Americans" and "us" are 'co-objects' of the verb, or you can you think of the appositive as elliptical for a relative clause, whatever. It's a very compressed form. Under no circumstances can "we" function as an adjective, even if "Americans" were the sole object of the preposition.*

Another rhetorical option in a case like this is repeating the preposition:

You should leave US politics to us, to Americans.

And it's obvious now that you can reverse the order, to change the emphasis.

Or you could elaborate the appositive to be another clause, going either way:

You should leave US politics to us, because we're actually Americans.

You should leave US politics to Americans, and that means us.

Etc.

@BC you were right the first time.

* Almost no circumstances, because English.

The world that encompasses this flesh is at the same time always strangely given through this same flesh. — plaque flag

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for.

Methodological solipsism even looks to be the proper approach if applied at the level of the species. — plaque flag

I think this is right. There's an argument people make that because humans and bees perceive flowers differently, every human being lives in their own private Idaho.

I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done.

Hume figured this out, and noted that he lacks the power not to believe in the persistence of objects, and concluded that there are things Nature deemed too important to leave to our frail reason.

The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. Philosophy was no longer about the problem of how to live but to solve problems by changing the conditions of life. — Fooloso4

Perhaps true, but it's not like no one built houses or roads or engaged in agriculture until Bacon. Man had been changing the conditions of life for millennia by the 16th century.

Thanks. It's nice to get a report from the field.

Interesting that you highlight the idea of introducing a bit more organization or discipline into people's thoughts and discussions. Obviously value in that, and it's value people associate with philosophy, so that's something.

I think there's something there. Much of scientific practice is analytic, in the sense that the aim is to find a way to isolate one factor from among the great many that go into producing any phenomenon we might be interested in. This is very difficult. I was surprised to find, when watching an episode of Nova, that once you've carefully gathered your samples it can be like another year before you get the results of carbon-dating. Every step is work.

So that's one thing. The enormous time and energy put into getting answers to questions made as specific as they can be, or as they need to be, whichever is achievable.

I think the main features of science as an enterprise are that it is communal and self-correcting. I don't know if that fits exactly in the traditional "method" box, but it's the crucial add-on to the carefulness above: for all the work dozens of people put in, they might miss something, so no one believes that there is any process available that marks your results as The Truth. They're just results, and the better the process the more weight they'll carry, but mistakes at either the level of practice or of theory are just expected.

Thus passeth away the relevance of philosophy.

if the becoming has no end then there can be no ultimate convergence — Leontiskos

How did the word "ultimate" get in there? There are obviously infinite sequences and series that converge without ever reaching what they converge on.

Some envision progress as the movement toward universal agreement. — Fooloso4

It's hard not to think of Peirce, asymptotic approach to 'truth' and all that, but even if you do conceive a project as aiming for universal agreement, that doesn't mean you expect to get there.

We're talking about the thesis that philosophy has a determinate pull (link). Saying, "There will always be points of divergence and points of convergence [among philosophers]" doesn't seem to help us in addressing that thesis. — Leontiskos

Sure it does. If the direction is determined statistically, we're just talking about evolution, which may not have a telos but does have at least local directionality.

the input of a professional ethicist I found to be valuable — LuckyR

This was, relatively speaking, an outsider to your field?

I'd heard that "ethicist" is a profession now. Was their expertise helpful? Can you describe that for us a little?

We haven't outgrown yet religion, politics or science, all of which require critical analyses and reflective interpretations. — 180 Proof

I think there's maybe a default tech-worshipping pragmatism where a philosophy 'should' be but never actually was. — plaque flag

I thought about this idea of philosophy as critique, but why should practices be incapable of self-critique. After all, that's what we would require of philosophy. I'm not saying it would be the norm. I understand something of institutional dynamics. But I think there's something presumptuous about philosophers, who lack the expertise and knowledge, however flawed and limited, of a field's practitioners, swooping in to pass judgment on their work. Better to cultivate the practice of critique among the producers of knowledge.

I think for a lot of people encountering philosophy might be transformative, might spur a sort of reflection they had never engaged in before, but I don't think philosophy has a monopoly on that. It wasn't transformative for me, but more like finding my tribe, where my peculiar bent was more or less normal.

I think science is most of what philosophy was trying to be for most of its history, so the emergence of modern science is almost like the maturation of philosophy, its fulfillment. In a world with actual physics and cosmology, psychology and neuroscience, sociology and anthropology and linguistics, what philosophy has to offer on the nature of reality or thought or human social life is, shall we say, quaint.

The bits of philosophy likely really to engage people still, I'd guess, are ethics and political philosophy, but that's because people already love arguing about what's right and wrong, and philosophy just provides opportunities to do that. We have a great body of writing about ethics and politics, but whether there's any knowledge there is hard to say.

For all that, there is something a bit magical about Plato, something that isn't trying to become science. I don't quite know what it is, and I don't think the history of philosophy since Plato gives much of a clue either, but maybe there was something worthwhile besides embryonic science in there all along.

If it's not empirical, and it's not mathematics, it's irrelevant.

Maybe that leaves room for something we could still call philosophy, I don't know.

If there is, at least in principle, a way to tie values back to something outside the individual, — Count Timothy von Icarus

That might be reinventing the wheel, if language is outside the individual in some sense, even if it's not outside all individuals in the aggregate, outside at least in the sense of being explicitly a technology of cooperation. And then there's @Isaac's narratives, which serve multiple purposes as language does.

then that provides a framework — Count Timothy von Icarus

This might be a mistake, looking for a framework. It could be we have many sorts of conversations and they have different sources and structures. I care about my kids and I care about democracy -- is that the same thing just because "care" is in both descriptions? Do we talk about these the same way?

understanding how value claims gets communicated without an infinite loop of translating mental state to mental state — Count Timothy von Icarus

Same problem we have everywhere, and I don't know how to solve it. is a persuasive statement of the view, and much as I'd like to, I don't know how to get around it, and I'm not willing just to reject it by fiat.

When I come up with a solution, the forum will be the first to know.

Our sense of values did have to emerge out of something after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and I don't see a better candidate for rock bottom than biology. I think everything goes back to being a living organism, first of all, and being whatever sorts of living organisms we are, which is to start with whatever we were crafted to be by evolution.

I've had some sympathy for the sort of emotive account you can get from Hume and Smith. (The moral sentiments.) I see all sorts of material to work with in the theory of cooperation, from Axelrod to Grice, which I think we can also assume has a biological basis.

My gut instinct (heh) is that we are not that different from the first Homo sapiens, and that our biology is much closer to the surface than we realize.

I don't think social norms work for this because they are too malleable, we need a more general principle that stands behind social norms, hence looking to how animals view fairness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously I think this is exactly the right approach.

I would put forward that the problem is not a misunderstanding of the word, rather that the word is being used as a short form for more than just itself. Simple elaboration clarifies the misunderstanding. — PhilosophyRunner

Is this assuming nominalism? That there is no "justice," or "good," that people can point to that extends outside the frame of "my desires and preferences?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's what he meant. I think @PhilosophyRunner meant that often when people talk they assume that their words will be interpreted as they interpret them, from their point of view, with all of their assumptions. Sometimes people recognize the need to spell out those assumptions, but often they don't. Philosophy is obsessive about spelling out assumptions -- witness you here bringing up nominalism -- but ordinarily people aren't, hence @PhilosophyRunner's suggestion that understanding can be improved by what he calls "elaboration," which I take to mean people spelling out their assumptions, their point-of-view. That's all.

Of course, your examples suggest, @PhilosophyRunner, that people agree less than they appear to, that for instance people who all say they want "justice" might have in mind very different things, but there may be examples that go the other way, where people don't realize they want the same thing because they use different words for it.

No matter how much a community of agents might appear to agree (or disagree) that "such and such is true of "the" real world", as far as linguistic designation is concerned they are merely talking past one another and gesticulating towards different and unsharable private worlds corresponding to their individuated mental processes. — sime

You said, "in AI", but this is supposed to apply to the psychology of animals as well, right?

You talk about your model and I talk about my model, but we're never actually talking about the same things.

as far as linguistic designation is concerned — sime

Can you explain why this qualifier? Is there some other way in which agents do share a world?

?

I know this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, but I was addressing the general question about how countries in the US sphere of influence develop.

You're suggesting that the US's net influence is to make other countries better than it can even manage of itself? Is the theory that it nobly sacrifices it's own people's freedoms to help improve those under it's sheltering wing? — Isaac

Well no, but something like what's in the first sentence wouldn't surprise me honestly. The US has a lot of problems but a biggie is the legacy of chattel slavery. If we provide aid and support to country not burdened by such a history, they might very well do better than we do.

Plus, there's that whole "do as I say not as I do" effect. I'm just saying a result like this might not be that ludicrous.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this.

I'm reminded of a very clever check fraud scheme I heard about once. Guy had gotten hold of the magnetic ink that's used to print routing and account numbers on checks so they can be read by a machine. He made some fake checks that had one bank's routing number encoded but another bank's name actually printed in English on the checks. When these checks went to the merchant's bank, they would sort them first through the machine and the ones that kicked out would then be sorted by the bank they went to. Then a loop would start, where one bank's machine would reject an account number and it would land on the trouble desk, someone would glance at the bank name on the check and say, oh that's not us, then send it to the other bank, whose machine would say, wrong bank, and then it would go right back. These checks would loop back and forth for months until some human finally noticed.

It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial. — GrahamJ

Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to keep the focus on reproduction rather than adaptation.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see — GrahamJ

This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove procreative behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research.