Comments

  • Clues to Identifying the Nature of Consciousness
    It's a nice poem and a legitimate way to think about consciousness. If you want to refer it more specifically to philosophical discussion, then I think the means you use to do poetry tell us a decent bit about consciousness and thinking.

    Namely, that whatever else thinking may be (and there is a whole lot that goes into thinking) the most precise way to know some of its structures is through language. We tend to ask, what is thinking or what is consciousness? And if you are asked specifically, what are you thinking about this moment, then you will reply I was thinking so and so.

    So even if your conscious thoughts were about images and fragments, your expression of it was verbal. So there is a sense in which thinking and language (including aspects of explicit consciousness) are intimately related. As Richard Burthogge once said, "words are the clothes of thought".

    As for poetry per se, well that's a very fascinating topic. I agree with Chomsky here (and almost everywhere) that ordinary language use is inherently creative. We use words that have probably never been stated in the exact same manner or order before, yet we understand what people are saying. And we don't know how we do it. So, speaking itself is often poetic in the creative sense of language use.

    Once it gets to the arts, actual poetry, lyrics, novels, that's just a whole other level of depth. In my opinion far beyond human understanding. And thankfully we have consciousness to appreciate it.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    I agree that we know that there are things that we know that are not available to the direct access of introspection. If we know that, we have access to at least one fact about them - that they exist. If we know that we must have indirect acess to them.Ludwig V

    If we discover them. If not, trivially, they remain in the dark.

    If we knew that there are some things that are not available to consciousness, they must be available to conciousness.Ludwig V

    That's almost a panpsychist claim, that everything is experience-realizing or experience-involving. That's not clear. We know that animals have sensations we cannot experience, like dogs will smell or squid with vision, etc.

    You could say that since we know about it, it also involves our consciousness. But that's not the same as us experiencing it, which I take to be the important part of having consciousness.

    Lastly, unless we are an evolutionary miracle such that we so happened to evolve to experience everything and know everything, it logically follows, that there are things we cannot understand or even experience, it is beyond our capacity to "latch on to", as it were.

    How do we distinguish between mental reality and other kinds (such as physical or abstract reality) unless we have access to those other kinds?Ludwig V

    Mental reality refers to those things that appear to our minds which need not have a corresponding object of which the mind is referring to.

    Physical reality refers to those things that exist absent us, but which we can experience as well.

    Mathematical reality is about taking mathematics to be existing entities or things which exist somehow.

    And on and on. This is a matter of emphasis; these are not metaphysical distinctions.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    My expectation is that it will be dealt with. But the process will be messy and only partially effective.Ludwig V

    I hope you are right, but I see reasons for skepticism.

    Indirect access to reality is still access to reality. I suppose that introspection counts as direct access? But there, the distinction between reality and appearance collapses.Ludwig V

    Introspection is limited, we don't know how our ideas arise, nor do we know how thoughts connect to one another. It is a mistake in modern philosophy of mind to believe that everything (or almost everything) must be accessible to consciousness. It's not.

    But you do have a good point, in so far as we are going to speak of the "in itself", I do believe that we know some fundamental aspects about mental reality in merely having consciousness.

    It's not clear to me how much this says about anything else about the world at large.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    Doesn't this show that happiness and unhappiness are not necessarily mutually exclusive?Ludwig V

    Yes. The irony or strange aspect about this here is that Schopenhauer does not mention much these happy moments, choosing to speak about art, which is fine and important. But it may overplay his pessimism.

    I agree with you that the world seems in a particularly bad way at the moment, There are many good reasons for being fearful, even alarmed, about the state of the world order these days. But one may reflect that it is not unusual for there to be good grounds for fear and one's worst fears may well turn out to be excessive. (Most of my childhood and youth was overshadowed by the threat of a nuclear holocaust.)Ludwig V

    That's a good point. Today we add climate change and even less controls than before on the nuclear issue. As Bertrand Russell pointed out: "You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years."

    One day the boy who cried wolf will be right. Hopefully not soon, but, sobriety ought to make us see we are not doing good as a species at all. It could change, absolutely. But it's yet to happen.

    It seems to me that while appearances are, indeed, all that appears to us, that the distinction between reality and appearance is available to us, not only within appearances, but also behind or beyond them.Ludwig V

    This framing is fine. I do think something like us being "indirectly" aware of whatever IS mind independently is probably what we do. The exact mechanism involved in this will depend on your own philosophy.

    It's still an important step removed from direct access.
  • I Refute it Thus!


    Apparently, he did do quite many things that brought him joy, walking his dogs, eating sausages in a tavern, going to the theatre and listening to music, and lots of other small details along this line.

    You're right about the asceticism part; he never took it that far. But I suppose he just had some form of depression. It's not that his pessimism per se is wrong, one can view the world that way, but it's a particularly gloomy way of looking at the world, which is not necessary.

    But given the state of the world, maybe his pessimism was in many respects, severely understated. We are running towards extinction, with enthusiasm.

    Still, life's small pleasures, empathy and of course the arts, are now more important than ever. Keep looking at those majestic mountains.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    That’s not something I postulate, and something that I question in Schopenhauer; I’m much more drawn to the ‘idea’ aspect of his philosophy, than the ‘world as will’ aspect, which I'm frankly sceptical of.Wayfarer

    As far as metaphysical ideas go, his is not bad. But it has problems which you also feel. Obviously a very hard topic to talk about in general.

    Incidentally I went to an open-air social gathering yesterday, a out-door ‘Philosophical Symposium’, the subject of which was 'The Suffering of the World: Schopenhauer's Christian Buddhism.' I hadn't attended before - it was held in a park near Sydney Harbour, convened by an informal group organised by the main speaker (picture below under the Peroni sign.)Wayfarer

    Very cool! You have no idea how jealous I am that I've never been to Sydney. My dream city to visit. Very interesting topic to discuss and seeing such a crowd attending is just fantastic.

    I felt the actual lecture concentrated too much on the familiar 'Schopenhauer as pessimist' meme, and not at all on the idealist side of his philosophy, but never mind, it was enjoyable to sit around a table and talk about philosophy with actual people. :wink:Wayfarer

    Yes, personal dynamics alter the conversation quite a lot. Being able to emphasize or make facial or give certain looks can be persuasive and enriching. Nice to be able to find such groups.

    As for the speaker emphasizing pessimism, yeah, it's a problem with Schopenhauer, it's easier to talk about than his version of transcendental idealism, which can be either hard to get across, or if people are told, they don't (I think, at least in my experience) realize the implications such views have, which are just radical.

    I suppose one needs a bit of the philosopher gene to be utterly dumbstruck by what others take to be too obvious to even mention. On the other hand, the more variety, the better I suppose.

    Thanks for sharing! :cool:
  • I Refute it Thus!
    On the same grounds as Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’: even if you suffered complete amnesia and forgot your identity, you would be aware of your own being. That’s the point about *any* being: on some level it is aware of its distinction from what is other to it. It knows that it is.Wayfarer

    Of having experience yes. On being able to distinguish between willed action and mere reflex, also. On some metaphysical postulate about some blind drive the universe follows (as well as us), that's further steps more advanced than experiencing or "willing" (in the common usage of the term).

    our grasp of reality is inversely proportional to our degree of attachment.Wayfarer

    And they may be right. This doesn't get us closer to the thing in itself. At least, I don't see how at the moment.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    Agree, but the awareness of will is not an appearance. We may not know what it is, but that it is, we can have no doubt.Wayfarer

    Well, if we don't know what it is, how can we say that it is? We could be wrong. But let's be somewhat more permissive:

    This is tricky. It depends on how you define "will". It it's the ordinary use of will, such as willed action, this doubtful. If it's Schopenhauer's, then one has to see what merits it has. It's not trivial. I constantly go back between Hume and Schopenhauer here.

    I think we can have (almost) no doubt that we have experience. Beyond that, I think we should be careful in ascertaining certainty in almost anything, outside maybe mathematics.

    But the uncertainty principle shows that there’s a limit to how exact we can be.Wayfarer

    Yes. At least, this is what our theories at the moment show, which may indeed hold up to future discoveries.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    I tend to agree but I guess that depends upon what we mean by appearance - in recent history we have certainly devised instruments that allow us to go beyond (ordinary) appearance and these tools seem to tell us that solid matter is almost entirely empty. And let's not get into quantum speculations.

    And in a separate vein, is it not the case that people who claim to be enlightened are able to see beyond appearances, at least in part? Is this not a goal of mediation, etc? I'm not personally in the higher consciousness business but I am curious about the framing of these things.
    Tom Storm

    But physics is also appearance too, just a much more refined attempt to make sense of the data of sense. Remember physics is mathematical because it tells us about the structure of the things that make the world, but the inner nature of these things is not revealed, we probably can't reach the "bottom level".

    As for enlightened people, no, at least I don't think so. It doesn't have anything to do with lack of training or practice or perceptiveness, it's related to the nature of our faculties. We can't step outside what we see to verify whatever it is we see.

    Likewise, we cannot leave our experience to see what may be behind it.

    Not necessarily what it is but how it appears - and it's an important distinction.

    Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”.

    Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
    Wayfarer

    I agree.

    But we do reach better approximations. And that's what we continue to do.

    I'd be careful there, it's a big statement!Wayfarer

    Even Schopenhauer, someone who one might think would disagree that we cannot know the thing in itself says:

    "Meanwhile it is carefully to be noted, and I have always kept it in mind, that even the inward observation we have of our own will still does not by any means furnish an exhaustive and adequate knowledge of the thing in itself. For even in self-consciousness, the I is not absolutely simple, but consists of a knower (intellect) and a known (will); the former is not known and the latter is not knowing, although the two flow together into the consciousness of an I. But on this very account, this I is not intimate with itself through and through, does not shine through so to speak, but is opaque, and therefore remains a riddle to itself."

    (WWR V.II p.196)

    The above is a mix of the classic translation with a newer one. The meaning is the same in both, however.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    Doesn't epistemology rely upon metaphysical commitments for it to make sense? I'm not sure one can meaningfully talk about what we can know unless we have resovled what there is and somehow we continually end up in a tail chasing discussion about whether an external world exists outside our perception and what it is. Not to mention the quesion of time and space - are they products of the cognitive apparatus of human minds, or do they exist? Don't scientists subscribe to a massive metaphysical commitment, that reality can be understood?Tom Storm

    They do - there is a world to which epistemology aims to establish knowledge claims of. But if we take metaphysics to mean, narrowly, the nature of the (mind-independent) world, then making claims about ordinary objects like tables or chairs are not metaphysical claims.

    These pertain to the mode of our cognition.

    Yes, science is metaphysics - in large part, not entirely - because it tries to tell us what that nature is.

    In any case, we do not - and cannot - go beyond appearance.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    that Meta-physics can bridge with reasoning & imagination*1.Gnomon

    I've read Eddington's book, it's very good and very much readable even today.

    But I'd say this is more closely associated with epistemology than metaphysics. There is always going to be a metaphysical component in epistemology, but it's quite small.

    One of the two tables is certainly a part of metaphysics. They everyday table, less so.
  • I Refute it Thus!


    That's fine and you are right that the matter we have now is just extraordinarily removed from our common conceptions of it. This is true and sure; I do agree the world is a construction of the mind. We don't even need metaphysics to establish this, I think it just follows form facts of the matter.

    The issue is that our everyday image of the world is not and probably cannot, be exhausted by whatever physics says about it. From an "everyday" perspective, you can "think away" all sensations and maybe most conceptions, but I, that is me specifically, have trouble removing solidity from this, it seems to me that based on manifest world terms, we still would bump up against something, even if we can't feel it.

    This is different that speaking about the micro-constituents of matter, as I see it,
  • I Refute it Thus!
    Solidity and the notion of 'hard matter' does not exist independently of mind and so kicking the rock, breaking a toe are mental experiences. It is how consciousness appears when experienced from our perspective. The solid stone and the foot's impact upon it are examples of the ability of consciousness to create a coherent world of experience - held together in the mind of God. Or in the case of Kastrup - we are all participants or aspects of a 'great mind' which is the source of all reality.Tom Storm

    Yes. And that is an argument that can be given. I don't disagree with some varieties of idealism by the way, like Kant's, or Burthogge's or Cudworth's.

    But that aside, I can think away everything I can about an object, including my concepts, my sensations, everything I can think of. I still have the intuition that even if I don't feel it, I cannot pass through walls, something is there that is not solely mental.

    But as you say, this can be explained by being a content of consciousness. It's nebulous.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    Fair enough. We seem to agree that understanding, like intelligence, comes in degrees. When someone wakes up during surgery there is something different about the situation than what we currently understand is happening, and figuring that out gives us a better understanding. Although, there is the old phrase, "You only get the right answer after making all possible mistakes", we should consider.Harry Hindu

    Quite. I suppose my "mitigated skepticism" always forces me to say that's the best explanation we have for now. But it could be quite wrong or it could be replaced given newer theories. But sure, we are getting closer and closer on these things.

    What does it mean for you to be tired if not having a lack of energy? What are you doing when you go to sleep and eat? What would happen if you couldn't find food? Wouldn't you "shut off" after the energy stores in your body were exhausted?Harry Hindu

    Here's the thing, which is tricky I admit, but a real issue. We can say we "shut down" when we go to sleep. Just as we can say the rocket went to the heavens, or we are recharging our energy when we eat.

    That's fine. But it's verbal. If we want to be literal, we'd have to put say, the technical bio-chemical explanation of what sleep encompasses. Then we would have something like a scientific definition of sleep. But then we have to see if the scientific explanation exhausts everything about sleeping. I am doubtful that we can reduce everything to scientific terms.

    We are borrowing words we use for computers and applying it to ourselves. This computerizes us and in turn we begin to think machines share in what makes us people. We break down the machine/human barrier using these words and it merits caution.

    I have been using computers and robots. What does that say about what intelligence is?Harry Hindu

    I think one can say that a person does calculations ("computations" if you will) or engages in processes or reasoning or even inference to the best explanation. But what we do and what computers do are not the same thing. It's superficial. We can say that a person kind of uses a "search engine" when it is looking for a word he can't remember. But it's not a literal search engine, it's something else, related to linguistics and psychology.

    Again, I don't think copying something is at all the same as being the same thing. The end results may look the same, but the ways we get the information are very different. Involving concepts, folk psychology, semantics, neurology and who knows what else. Computers work with programs made by people.

    We don't have programs like computers have them. I mean you could use the word "program" if you want, but it does not seem to me to be the same thing at all.

    A brain functioning in isolation is a mind without a person, and is an impossible occurrence, which is why I pointed out before the distinction between empiricism and rationalism is a false dichotomy. The form your reason takes is sense data you have received via your interaction with the world. You can only reason, or think, in shapes, colors, smells, sounds, tastes and feelings. The laws of logic take the form of a relation between scribbles on a screen which corresponds to a process in your mind (a way of thinking).Harry Hindu

    I mean, you can see brains in isolation in jars in many laboratories all over the world. But would people say there are minds in jars? A mind needs a person (with a brain of course), and a person can be in isolation from other people. Look at the phenomenon of feral children, for instance.

    Natural selection programmed humans via DNA. Humans are limited by their physiology and degree of intelligence, just as a computer/robot is limited by it's design and intelligence (efficiency at processing inputs to produce meaningful outputs).Harry Hindu

    I partially agree. I do believe that humans are limited by physiology and degree of intelligence, sure. Computers are "limited" in the sense that the programs we add to them are limited by the limitations we have due to our genetic makeup.

    I just don't see how we can claim intelligence to a computer because it looks like (the data given out) it. Again, for me, this is akin to saying that submarines really "swim" and that airplanes "fly". Yeah, you can say that. But it's verbal. In Hebrew airplanes "glide", in French, submarines "navigate". These are ways of speaking, not factual matters.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    Berkeley sometimes gets a bad rap. I know very little of him, having opted for Locke and Hume instead.

    But if any "idealist" merits some teasing (if this is warranted at all) it would be Arthur Collier. He didn't even have God as a guarantee of stability or existence of external objects.

    The biggest issue here is that, for whatever reason, we have some trouble (at least I do) in understanding how concretely existing things could be solely ideas.

    Seems to me to be the one thing you can't think away from objects in some form or another.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    I think you are confusing how anesthesia works with how the brain and mind are related. Those are two separate issues. If you Google, "how does anesthesia work" you will find many articles that do not seem to exhibit any kind of doubt about how anesthesia works on the brain. How the brain relates to the mind is a separate and hard problem. How anesthesia works is not a hard problem. If it were we would be having a lot more issues with people going under.Harry Hindu

    Sure, I am agreeing that anesthesia works. We also know how to replace limbs, like arms, and get people having a hand "functioning" again, despite not having a clue how willed action works.

    But you have perspective like these, which are not uncommon:

    https://www.sciencealert.com/for-over-150-years-how-general-anaesthesia-works-has-eluded-scientists-we-re-finally-getting-close

    Now we are closer to getting a better understanding of how it works. So, we've used for 150 years without knowing why is works as it does.

    The point is that people do things without knowing how they are done. This includes acts of creativity, aspects of intelligence, willed action, etc.

    Are you saying that it is sensible to call, "intelligence" a thing, or an object, instead of what things do? When you point to intelligence, what are you pointing at - a thing or a behavior or act?Harry Hindu

    If I am pointing at something, it could be an act, it could be an idea, it could be a calculation. I wouldn't say that a program is intelligent, nor a laptop. That's kind of like saying that when a computer loses power and shuts off, it is "tired". The people who designed the program and the laptop are.

    Not behaving like a person, but behaving intelligently. Does every person behave intelligently? If not, then being a person does not make you necessarily intelligent. They are separate properties. What are the characteristics of an intelligent person, or thing?Harry Hindu

    Behavior is an external reaction of an internal process. A behavior itself is neither intelligent nor not intelligent, it depends on what happened that lead to that behavior.

    What characteristics make a person intelligent? Many things: problem solving, inquisitiveness, creativity, etc. etc. There is also the quite real issue of different kinds of intelligence. I think that even having a sense of humor requires a certain amount of intelligence, a quick wit, for instance.

    It's not trivial.

    I don't see a difference between brain and mind. I think we both have similar brains and minds. My brain and mind are less similar to a dog or cat's brain and mind. Brains and minds are the same thing just from different views in a similar way that Earth is the same planet even though it looks flat from it's surface and spherical from space.Harry Hindu


    No difference? A brain in isolation does very little. A mind needs a person, unless one is a dualist.

    That doesn't sound strange at all. Is not part of studying humans studying what they created? Humans are calling it artificial intelligence. Are we to believe them when studying them? The other examples are nonsensical. Again, the inventor of the radio and mirror-makers are not claiming that their devices are intelligent.

    None of what you have said explains what makes organic matter special in that it has intelligence and inorganic matter does not.
    Harry Hindu

    But if they claimed it then it would be true? No. We program computers, not people. We can't program people, we don't know how to do so. Maybe in some far off future we could do so via genetics.

    If someone is copying Hamlet word for word into another paper, does the copied Hamlet become a work of genius or is it just a copy? Hamlet shows brilliance, copying it does not.
  • I Refute it Thus!
    I think Tallis is awesome, probably my favorite contemporary philosopher actually. But as with anything, he has good stuff and less good stuff.

    What's kind of surprising in many of these conversations is that people don't bother to spell out what they mean when they say "materialism", "immaterialism", "Idealism", "mentalism", "neutral monism", etc.

    He simply assumes people will know what he means. I can only surmise that he thinks that "materialism" implies solidity. Why is this so self-evident given how much more sophisticated out understanding of matter is.

    And as others have pointed out, that something is solid does not imply anything about the ontological status of the object.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    It is known how it is done, or else they wouldn't be able to consistently put people under anesthesia for surgery and they wake up with no issues. The problem you are referring to is the mind-body problem which is really a problem of dualism. If you think that the mind and body are separate things then you do have hard problem to solve. If you think that they are one and the same, just from different views, then you are less likely to fall victim to the hard problem.Harry Hindu

    That's what many anesthesiologists say. Yes they can put people to sleep, clearly, but the mechanism by which this works is not well understood. They can do something without understanding very well how the body reacts the way it does. No, I'm not a dualist. I'm a "realistic naturalist" in Galen Strawson's terms.

    . Function does not imply that it does one thing. A function can include many tasks. What if I said that the brain's function is to adapt one's behaviors to new situations? That function would include many tasks. Both terms are used to refer to behavioral expectations.Harry Hindu

    So what's the benefit of using "function" instead of process or what a thing does? Saying it's one of the processes of the brain does not carry the suggestion that it does a few main things, and then some secondary things which are less important somehow. Sure, no term is perfect, but we can then start believing that function is something nature does and attribute it to things that fit these criteria, including computers.

    Many people in this thread are saying that you can observe someone's behavior but their behavior can fool us into believing they are intelligent, implying that behavior is not intelligence, but symbolic of intelligence. So it seems to me that intelligence is a process of the mind, not the body. Which is it?Harry Hindu

    I agree. I personally think that it is more beneficial to think in terms of "this person" has a mind like mine, than a brain like mine. We deal with people on a daily level in mental terms, not neurophysiological terms. We could do the latter if one wanted, but it would be very cumbersome and we'd have to coin many technical terms.

    It is not difficult to image a computer-robot that can be programmed to do the same thing.Harry Hindu

    Imagine yes. To actually do? I think we're far off. The most we are doing with LLM's is getting a program to produce sentences that sound realistic. Or mesh images together.

    But a parrot can string together sentences and we wouldn't say the parrot is behaving like a person.

    Sounds like what humans do when communicating. You learned rules for using the scribbles, which letter follows the other to spell a word correctly, and how to put words in order following the rules of grammar. It took you several years of immersing yourself in the use of your native language to be able to understand the rules. The difference is that a computer can learn much faster than you. Does that mean it is more intelligent than you?Harry Hindu

    Here I just think this is the wrong view of language. It's the difference between a roughly empiricist approach to language "learning" and a rationalist one. We can say, for the sake of convenience, that babies "learn" languages, but they don't in fact learn it. It grows from the inside, not unlike a child going through puberty "learns" to become a teenager. But let's put that aside.

    Ok, suppose I grant for the sake of argument, that computers "learn" faster than we can. Why can't we say the same things about mirrors? Or that cars run faster than we do? Or that we fly more than penguins? If you grant this, then the issue is terminological.

    Then, for you, there is a distinction between organic and inorganic matter in that one can be intelligent and the other can't. What reason do you have to believe that? Seriously, dig deep down into your mind and try to get at the reasoning for these claims you are making. The only question remaining here is what is so special about organic matter? If you can't say, then maybe intelligence is not grounded in substance, but in process.Harry Hindu

    No. Not in principle in terms of results. The point is, that I believe we are astronomically far away from understanding the brain, much less the mind (and emergent property of brains). The brain is organic. Doesn't it make more sense to understand what intelligence and language is from studying human beings that from studying something we created? I mean, it would strange to say that we should study cellphones to learn about language, or a radio to learn about the ear.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    If neuroscientists can connect a computer to a brain in such a way as to allow a patient to move a mouse cursor by thinking about it in their mind, it would seem to me that they have an understanding (at least a basic understanding) of both.Harry Hindu

    A basic understanding yes. Some structural understanding probably. But notice that these things tell us little. For instance, an anesthesiologist can make someone lose consciousness, but it is not known how this is done. Some liquid enters the bloodstream does something to the brain and we lose consciousness. It's functional in the sense you are using it, and it says something but it's not well understood.

    What are the primary and secondary functions of a brain? What are the primary and secondary functions of a computer? Are there any functions they share? If we were to design a humanoid robot where its computer brain was designed to perform the same primary and secondary functions as the brain, would it be intelligent, or have a mind? If not, then you must be saying that there is something in the way organic matter, as opposed to inorganic matter is constructed, (or more specifically something special about carbon atoms) that allows intelligence and mind.Harry Hindu

    Again with function. Why not just say capacity? Function implies it does one main thing, but it does many things. We'd consider the capacity to be conscious to be primary, but that's from our own (human) perspective, not a naturalistic perspective, which I think ought to treat all things equally.

    A computer does what the coding is designed for it to do. But here we do become bewitched by terminology. You can say that a computer "processes" information, or "reads" code or "performs calculations". That's what we attribute to it as doing.

    With people, the difference is that we are the ones categorizing (and understanding) everything, so we have a quite natural bent to interpret things in ways we understand. As for organic matter, it's a difference, billions of years of evolution and a complexity that is mind-boggling. It goes way beyond crunching numbers and data. The capacity to recreate a human brain in non-organic stuff, may be possible, but the engineering feats required to do so are just astronomical.

    I just want to make sure that you're not exhibiting a bias in that only human beings are intelligent without explaining why. What makes a human intelligent if not their brains? Can a human be intelligent without a brain?

    If you want to say that intelligence is a relationship between a body that behaves in particular ways and brain, then that would be fair. What if we designed a humanoid robot with a computer brain that acted in human ways? You might say that ChatGPT is not intelligent because it does not have a body, but what about an android?

    The point of my questions here is I'm trying to get at if intelligence is the product of some function (information processing), or some material (carbon atoms), or both?
    Harry Hindu

    Brains make people intelligent... I mean yeah that's one way to phrase it. But so does education, culture, learning, etc. Yes, that gets "processed" in the brain, but we cannot reduce it to the brain yet, in principle it has to be there, but in practice, I think we are just massively far from realizing how the brain works with these things.

    Also, a kind of trivial example: a person may have a brain and be completely "stupid". They could be in a coma or brain dead. There's something kind of off in saying this person is stupid, because his brain is not working. There's something to work out in this.

    Take ChatGPT, how does it work? It goes through a massive data base of probabilistic words to give the most likely outcome of the following word. But look at what we are doing now. You don't read (nor do I read you) by remembering every word you say. It would be a massive headache. We get meanings or gists and respond off of that. That's the opposite of what ChatGPT does.

    Yeah, I think other animals are intelligent. No doubt, but in so far as I am saying that about them, it's related to the usage of them having capabilities that allow them to survive in the wild. That's kind of the standard as far as I know. But there are other aspects we may want to include in intelligence when it comes to animals.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    Let's be patient. I think trying to do much in one post will cause us to start talking past each other. Let's make sure we agree on basic points first.Harry Hindu

    That sounds good to me, I'd propose we take the ordinary usage of the word "intelligence" as the starting point. What people tend to say when they use the word in everyday life. Unless you have something better which I'd be glad to hear.

    It is only when we approach the boundaries of what it is we are talking about (which is typical in a philosophical context) that we tend to worry about what the words mean.Harry Hindu

    Yes, correct.

    We have developed the ability to connect a computer to a person's brain and they are able to manipulate the mouse cursor and type using just their thoughts. Does this not show that we have at least begun to tap into the functions of the mind/brain to the point where we can say that we understand something about how the brain functions? Sure, we have a ways to go, but that is just saying that our understanding comes in degrees as well.Harry Hindu

    "Understand something", yes. This would be activity in the brain. I don't, however, see this having much to say about the mind. We could, theoretically (or in principle), know everything about the brain when we are consciously aware, and still not know how the brain is capable of having mental activity, which must be the case.

    The issue here, as I see it, is how much this "something" amounts to. I'm not too satisfied with the word "function" to be honest. It seems to suggest to me a "primary thing" an organ does, while leaving "secondary things" as unimportant or residual. This should cause a bit of skepticism.

    Which of your organs involved with reasoning? Your brain. Your brain is a mass of neurons. Your mass of neurons reasons. Does a mass of silicon circuits reason?

    Let's start off with a definition of intelligence as: the process of achieving a goal in the face of obstacles. What about this definition works and what doesn't?
    Harry Hindu

    I don't want to sound pesky. I still maintain that reasoning (or intelligence) is something which people do and have respectively, not neurons or a brain. Quite literally neurons in isolation or a brain in isolation shows no intelligence or reasoning, if we are still maintaining ordinary usage of these words.

    You say neurons are involved in reasoning. But there is a lot more to the brain than neurons. Other aspects of the brain, maybe even micro-physical processes may be more important. Still, all this talk should lead back to people, not organs, being intelligent or reasoning.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    What if we were to start with the idea that intelligence comes in degrees? Depending on how many properties of intelligence some thing exhibits, it possesses more or less intelligence.

    Is intelligence what you know or how you can apply what you know, or a bit of both? Is there a difference between intelligence and wisdom?
    Harry Hindu

    It may and probably does come in degrees. However, notice, that neither you nor I have defined what "intelligence" is. I think real life problem solving is a big part. And so is reasoning and giving reasons for something.

    But this probably overlooks a lot of aspects of intelligence, which I think are inherently nebulous. Otherwise, discussions like these wouldn't keep arising, since everything is clear. Wisdom? Something about it coming as we age, usually related to deep observations. Several other things, depending on who you ask.

    That's even more subjective than intelligence.

    So what else is missing if you are able to duplicate the function? Does it really matter what material is being used to perform the same function? Again, what makes a mass of neurons intelligent but a mass of silicon circuits not? What if engineers designed an artificial heart that lasts much longer and is structurally more sound than an organic one?Harry Hindu

    We can replace hearts and limbs. If function - whatever it is - is the main factor here, then aren't we done studying the heart or our limbs? I doubt we'd be satisfied by this answer, because we still have lots to discover about the heart and our limbs.

    And these things we are still studying say, how the heart is related to emotion or why some hearts stop beating without a clear cause, are these not "functions" too?

    I don't understand what it means to say that a mass of neurons is intelligent.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    What these points convey to me is that we need a definition to start with.Harry Hindu

    I don't have a good definition. Problem solving? Surviving? Doing differential calculus? Tricking people?

    It's very broad. I'd only be very careful in extrapolating from these we do which we call intelligent to other things. Dogs show intelligent behavior, but they can't survive in the wild. Are the smart and stupid?

    It's tricky.

    How so? If we can substitute artificial devices for organic ones in the body there does not seem like much of a difference in understanding.Harry Hindu

    Sure, we have a good amount of structural understanding about some of the things hearts (and other organs) do. As you mentioned with the Chinese case above, it's nowhere near exhaustive. It serves important functional needs, but "function", however one defines it, is only a part of understanding.

    And of course, thinking, reflection is just exponentially more difficult to deal with than any other organ.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    You were talking about people that attribute terms like "intelligence" to LLMs as being deluded. My point is that philosophers seem to think they know more about LLMs than AI developers do.Harry Hindu

    No, they do not. But when it comes to conceptual distinctions, such as claiming that AI is actually intelligence, that is a category error. I see no reason why philosophers shouldn't say so.

    But to be fair, many AI experts also say that LLM's are not intelligent. So that may convey more authority to you.

    What is understanding? How do you know that you understand anything if you never end up properly mimicking the something you are trying to understand?Harry Hindu

    Understanding is an extremely complicated concept that I cannot pretend to define exhaustively. Maybe you could define it and see if I agree or not.

    As I see it understanding is related to connecting ideas together, seeing cause and effect, intuiting why a person does A instead of B. Giving reasons for something as opposed to something else, etc.

    But few, if any words outside mathematics have full definitions. Numbers probably.

    We can mimic a dog or a dolphin. We can get on four legs and start using our nose, or we can swim and pretend we have capacities we lack.

    What does that tell you though?

    AI developers are calling LLMs artificially intelligent, with the term, "artificial" referring to how it was created - by humans instead of "naturally" by natural selection. I could go on about the distinction between artificial and natural here but that is for a different thread:Harry Hindu

    Yeah, it is artificial. But the understanding between something artificial and something organic is quite massive.

    Why? What makes a mass of neurons intelligent, but a mass of silicon circuits not?Harry Hindu

    Masses of neurons are intelligent? People are intelligent (or not) and we try to clarify the term. Maybe you use an IQ test, or "street smarts", the ability to persuade, etc.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    To say that AI developers and computer scientists are deluding themselves you seem to imply that AI computer scientists should be calling philosophers to fix their computers and software.Harry Hindu

    We are talking about LLM's not problems with software.

    Cardiologists do not use a computer to simulate the pumping of blood.Harry Hindu

    That's the point.

    You seem to think that mimicking something is the same as understanding it.

    Then are we deluding ourselves whenever we use the term "intelligent" to refer to ourselves?Harry Hindu

    We could be. We use these terms as best we can for ourselves and others, sometimes to animals. But of course, we could be wrong.

    We have to deal with life as it comes and often have to simplify extremely complicated actions to make sense of them.

    The point is that mimicking behavior does nothing to show what goes on in a person's head.

    Unless you are willing to extend intelligence to mirrors, plants and planetary orbits. If you do, then the word loses meaning.

    If you don't, then let's hone in on what makes most sense, studying people who appear to exhibit this behavior. Once we get a better idea of what it is, we can proceed to do it to animals.

    But to extend that to non-organic things is a massive leap. It's playing with a word as opposed to dealing with a phenomenon.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    You are correct to say that it is not that the idea of artificial intelligence doesn't really reach 'intelligence' or consciousness. The problem may that the idea has become mystified in an unhelpful way. The use of the word 'intelligence' doesn't help. Also, it may be revered as if it is 'magic', like a new mythology of gods.Jack Cummins

    I can understand that. But again, why aren't we mystified by human lungs? You can make the same argument, since we can't replicate it on a computer it is now mystified.

    Magic, I mean, sure we are the only creatures with the capacity for self-reflection (so far as we know).It makes sense that we would want to understand it, but to do so you should proceed with human beings, not computers.

    Transhumanism is a lot of hot air, imo. But I may be wrong.
  • Questioning the Idea and Assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Implications
    I don't think it does raise any questions about intelligence or consciousness at all. It is useful and interesting on its own merit, but people who are taken by this equaling intelligence I think are deluding themselves into a very radical dualism which collapses into incoherence.

    To make this concrete and brief. Suppose we simulate on a computer a person's lunges' and all the functions associated with breathing, are we going to say that the computer is breathing? Of course not. It's pixels on a screen; it's not breathing in any meaningful sense of the word.

    But it's much worse for thinking. We do not know what thinking is for us. We can't say what it is. If we can't say what thinking is for us, how are we supposed to that for a computer?

    So sure, engage with "AI" and LLM's and all that, but be cognizant that these things are fancy tools, telling us nothing about intelligence, or thinking or consciousness. Might as well say a mirror is conscious too.
  • How can one know the ultimate truth about reality?


    We can't.

    The best we can do is to get better approximations, while acknowledging that the "ultimate" nature of reality is beyond us.
  • What is the (true) meaning of beauty?
    Absolutely, such experiences very much can mark one's life and create special memories.

    It's tempting to say that beauty is an objective thing "out there", which we have the privilege to access to on occasion. But I don't think it's quite right.

    At its most basic, what's beautiful is what strikes as being beautiful at a given occasion. For whatever reason some occasions happen to be far more profound than others. But I don't think we can universalize from ourselves to the world at large.

    We see examples of animals finding certain things at least attractive (if not beautiful, then close to it) which we can't make much sense of. How dogs greet each other, or how certain birds look for mating partners etc.

    We find it puzzling to see such behavior, but I'd wager other creatures can't find beauty or attraction, in many of the things we find them in. Maybe there's some overlap somewhere, but it's hard to know.
  • Behavior and being


    LLM's become even more complex too, because if one believes that the words it uses to make sentences refer to things, then naturally some can believe this indicates such things have some kind of "inner mental life".

    But yeah, in this case statistical correlation makes sense. I'd wager it's different with biological systems, like ducks or tigers or foxes.
  • Behavior and being


    The issue, I see it, becomes significantly harder the more complicated a model is.

    If the model is about a particle, well, there's is only so much tinkering you can do, beyond a point, given the simplicity involved, the thing described by the model, is probably a very good approximation to the thing itself, again because it is so simple.

    And much to our great Suprise, the model in simple systems show quite mind-boggling behavior, that we are still debating the foundations of such experiments 100 years later, apparently no closer to a resolution now than back then.

    But this complexity just becomes overwhelmingly difficult with things like insects, much less ducks.

    We have very little reason to believe that just because a thing we create walks like a duck and quacks like one, is actually a duck (famous phrase aside).

    At best, if we get the physiological properties more or less right, then we could say something about flying or ability to withstand environmental conditions.

    But whatever is going on "behind the eyes", well, models will tell us almost nothing. What matters to understand a duck, is how the creature is interpreting the world. Behavior tells us almost nothing, especially is the duck is a mechanical construct, we are leaving out way too much.
  • Ontological status of ideas
    So, chairs exists and numbers subsist? Is that a common understanding?Art48

    Chairs are mental constructions; they do not exist in the mind-independent world.

    Numbers are strange. They are discovered through our minds but seem to be independent of it.

    But natural numbers are not constructed the way chairs are. For one thing they are among the simplest things one could image.
  • The Mind-Created World


    Yeah. Let's leave it there for the time being. It was still an interesting chat. :up:
  • The Mind-Created World
    I see him reacting in different ways to is consistent with the qualities I perceive in those different things. That's all I'm claiming.Janus

    Which is fine. But why would you expect otherwise? What epistemic access do you have to compare your view to something else's? So of course, you will interpret the world and other creatures' behavior, in a way that makes sense to you.

    They wouldn't react that way if they were blind and felt no bodily sensations, though, would they? If not then we can conclude that they feel the heat and sense the height just as do. I don't know if this is universally true, but it is said that dogs already react instinctively to snakes when they are very young, but would you expect them to do that if they could not sense the presence of the snake?Janus

    Yeah, it would make sense for them to perceive threats for survival. Otherwise, we wouldn't have dogs, which would be bad.

    we know they have sense organs and bodies not all that different to ours give us reason to believe that they at least see the things in the environment that we see, and that those things exist independently of us and the dogs, whatever the ultimate nature of those existences are. So, I don't see that I'm claiming anything which is not consistent with our experiences. That said of course we cannot be absolutely certain of anything.Janus

    Yeah, I am not denying that the use experimental medication on mice, then they move on to humans.

    But we should be cautious in paying to much attention to outer features (eyes, organs), with inner experience.
  • The Mind-Created World
    But is it not most reasonable to think they are responses (whether innate or not) perhaps to survival, or perhaps to enjoying themselves or whatever, to different things in different situations?Janus

    Of course, there is no doubt, they react to things and are often happy with humans and other dogs, sometimes even with other creatures.

    I mean you seem not to want to admit that the dog sees a ball, and yet you say the dog sees me making a gesture or movement. So my dogs see me and I'm an object in the environment. My dogs recognize me—of that there is no doubt. Now they may well not see me in the same way as people do (but then different people may not see me in exactly the same way either).Janus

    You seem to want to say that you know what dogs see. I don't claim to have that level of epistemic access, that is why Nagel wrote and people debate "what it's like to see a bat".

    Let me speak in your terms, yes dogs see certain balls they play with. How they see it and most importantly, if it is similar to the way I see it, I cannot say - it's not possible to say because we are not dogs.

    I am not denying they see things and play with things. I just think you are claiming to know more than what is possible for us to know. Maybe I am wrong - I freely admit that. Maybe dogs do see balls very similarly to the way we do and maybe dogs see you in a way that other people do. I would be extremely skeptical.

    When you say other people don't see you in the exact way - well, I mean - if you mean "exactly the same way" for other people is somewhat akin to a dog also seeing you as other people do, but in a slightly different way, then I don't know what to say here. These seem to be astronomically different.

    And again, no bullshit or false modesty or anything, I could be completely wrong. I only say that I just don't find it convincing.

    Also you say that dogs will not jump into a fire or from a high place—so it follows that they perceive fire and high places. They also do not bump into trees or walls (unless they are blind which was the case with my mother's cocker spaniel when I was a kid). They behave differently and consistently towards different things in the environment and that behavior makes sense in terms of how we perceive those objects. I don't know what else to say. If you remain unconvinced then I have nothing further to add.Janus

    They do not jump from high places or don't go into fire as soon as they are born! If that is not innate, I don't know what is. So, they don't do something before they even develop into a mature animal. Clearly, they do many things at the very moment they perceive the world, there is no time for "learning from perception" here, it's at first instance.

    And that goes for many animals, turtles racing to the ocean as soon as they hatch, birds reacting to mother giving them worms before they can see, etc, etc.

    Now, if dogs see fire and high places like we do, again, I don't know. Maybe.

    Sure, again, they don't run into concrete things, no animal does that I know of. I am not saying they don't see a world and react to it. But that it makes sense to you (or me, or any other human being alive) says very little about how the dog actually experiences the world, that's a massive leap into claiming knowledge about a different creature.

    Ending on a point of agreement, I hope: they may have some basic "ideas", such as play, prey, anger, protection, the basic things all animals need for survival. In so far as we also have these basic notions, there is some overlap, sure. Clearly food, mating, danger and like basic emotions we also have, beyond that, I don't know how they see and experience the world. I can guess, but that's the best we can do.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I can't imagine why anyone would want to deny animals even a minimal amount of intelligence. I have to stress I don't believe that conceptualization is some amazing special ability. The amazing ability here is syntactic language, conceptualization is merely a part of describing language-use.goremand

    That's interesting to me. I think conceptualization of any kind is quite remarkable, even proto-conceptualization. But language is a unique instance, so far as we know, so it is, in a sense, more "special".

    The thing is, if you go down this road of "creating associations always involves the use of concepts" I believe you will end up attributing powers of conceptualization to very simple organisms, including machines.goremand

    It's tricky to know where the cut-off point between explicit consciousness (such as elephants or monkeys) stops and mere reaction kicks in, maybe a fish or an oyster. But I do believe there is such a point.

    To talk in this manner about machines, is to play with words, it's not substantive as I see it. So, we agree here.
  • The Mind-Created World
    I have tried throwing sticks too large for the dog to pick up. Or bricks. He will chase them but as soon as he realizes it is too big or hard to pick up in his mouth he loses interest straight away. In any case when you say the dog chases movement it seems you agree that the dog and I both see something moving at the same place and time and in the same direction and the same distance.Janus

    Ok, so we can guess that what initially gets them going is motion associated by a gesture you make which is related to "play time". Once the reach the object, maybe they try to life it up, maybe they get confused for a moment and then they look at you or ignore the object.

    Here's the issue: why don't they pick up the object? Is it because they experience its structure as being too big and then retreat? Or is it an innate predisposition that makes them realize that this thing is too heavy (not related to structure) ?

    I don't know. I think we can agree that the best we can do in the human case, which is the case in which we have the most data, is to try to understand a little why people do what they do - and even that is very hard very frequently.

    When it comes to other animals, we are effectively guessing. Maybe they don't pick it up because they perceive a structure that's too big, maybe it's an innate response related to heaviness or pain avoidance.

    I have never denied that the dog has a different experience of the world. I have no doubt he experiences the things I experience differently, but the difference is not all that radical and can be made sense of by considering the differences between my constitution and the dog's constitution. The dog sees his food bowl as 'to-be-eating-from' and his bed as 'to-be-laying-in' and given the way I experience those things in terms of size, shape and hardness the dog's behavior towards those things is consistent.Janus

    Here is where we disagree, and I don't see a remedy. I think the experiences are, in large part, very different. Sometimes there can be overlap - no creature is going to run into a fire or jump from a large distance. But whereas I think you are attributing this to shared structure, I think it's an innate response (not conscious) related to survival.

    How much we share is very difficult to ascertain, but I think we could be misleading ourselves if we take ourselves to be reliable narrators of things outside us (the world, including other animals). It was no until we began to doubt our shared experiences, that modern science arose.

    Also, one should mention dogs are the creatures which we have most co-existed with out of all animals, making them particularly misleading, imo.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Of course animals have intelligence and memory, but how does that necessitate the use of concepts? Memories are just impressions made by particular events, for example an animal doesn't need the general concept of a "child" in order to remember that they have children to feed.goremand

    True. I should have been more careful. I don't know if animals have concepts per se, maybe they have some sort of pre-conceptual awareness.

    But they have representations unique to them. The issue I wanted to highlight is that I think it's kind of hard to imagine having perception without some minimal intellectual capacities, because then it seems to me it would be hard to retain the perception.

    Examples of animals suffering from abuse and being fearful of humans for a while seem to suggest some degree of association, which goes slightly beyond "mere" perception.
  • The Mind-Created World
    The point is only that given the way we perceive things the dog's manifest behavior towards those same things makes sense.Janus

    Of course, it would make sense for us we are analyzing the world through our human-centric perspective. One cannot help but see dogs chasing balls or peeing on trees, it absolutely makes sense for us to interpret animal actions in a way we can understand. It would be quite impractical (in everyday life) to attempt to "be a bat", to use Nagel's phrase, because we aren't.

    The point is not the words, it's the animals experience. My point is not that dogs chase balls, but rather that dogs chase movement. You can throw any object you wish and most of the time the dog will chase it.

    Likewise with peeing, we experience it as a dog peeing on a tree. The dog might experience it as marking territory in this place because of particular smell or an ingrained propensity to do this.

    . We know we can chase balls but not walls or trees and so on. We can observe that dogs see the same things we do, and additionally there is a consistency there between how we see things and how dogs see things which is demonstrated by their behavior towards those things. I don't see how that can reasonably be deniedJanus

    It can be reasonably denied if you assume, as I believe is correct, that dogs have a different experience of the world. This consistency we see with our interpretation of the dog's behavior does not mean that we are accurately describing what dogs actually do, it does describe how we experience dogs.

    I should add, that going through a door and chasing a ball at best shows that concrete stuff (stuff you can't go through) is a real thing - concreteness exists. But this says very, very little about animal experience. That's why we need to do animal science, to try to understand, to the extent we can, why they do what they do.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Ok, here goes:

    The dog sees the ball as something to chase, the doorway as something to walk through, the wall as something not to walk into, the tree as something to piss against, the car as something to get excited about going in.

    So the 'somethings' have roughly the same characteristics for the dog as they do for us. "Wall, 'tree'. 'doorway'. and 'car' are just names, but the things they name certainly seem to be real mind-independent things with certain attributes.
    Janus

    Let's minimize human attributions to animals. The dog chases something, walks through something, pisses against something, etc.

    What characteristics of something makes us chase it? Is it the roundness, the colour? Surely not, for then we would be chasing globes or round candy. We don't do that. These things are round (to us), but we don't chase them.

    What characteristics of something causes us to urinate on it? Dogs urinate on other things as well.

    We don't know if a dog experiences a ball as an object which is separate from the environment. It looks that way to us, but that doesn't mean it's something like the dog picking something up in a continuous stream of stuff or things. Maybe some things trigger the dog to go chasing and other peeing.

    That doesn't mean there is a specific property that resembles anything we have that causes them to do what they do. They chase things that are thrown. They pee on things that make them mark territory.

    That does not mean they chase something because it is like a ball or pee because it is something like a tree. It's a disposition in the dog to act a certain way given certain environmental cues. Maybe motion triggers the running, not the shape, maybe scent triggers the peeing. You can say ah, yes, but the scent is given off by trees, maybe, maybe it's the earth or concrete or anything else.
  • The Mind-Created World


    I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles.

    I think that is a very strange claim, why are the use of concepts necessary for perception? I would not invoke conceptualization for any reason other than to describe the use of syntactic language, which is an ability only humans and arguably one or two other animals have.goremand

    I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memory, otherwise I don't see how a creature could perceive without constantly forgetting.