Cruise missiles fired from a nuclear submarine directly into a residential area. It is as Zelensky says state terrorism, no question. — Wayfarer

Agreed. But the question is what we ought do about it, not what we ought call it.

we interact with the environment and then colour, shape, eggs, etc. are "enacted" by that interaction. — Michael

No. That's not what enactivist accounts of cognition are saying.

In short, given a Markov blanket partition, it is fairly straightforward to show that internal states can be interpreted as encoding Bayesian beliefs about external states that cause its sensory states – and so play a central role in the construction of free energy, which is defined relative to these beliefs

Note, the Bayesian beliefs are about external states. The subject is an external state, not an internal model. The 'egg' is the subject of a Bayesian optimised policy, which we can render into grammar as "the egg is ovoid"

I suspect that you are expressing much the same view as Isaac and I, but giving it the wrong name. — Banno

Hopefully made clear by the paper I cited above.

Uh huh.

Here's Friston on enactivist interpretations of active inference. You'll note the clear use of Markov boundary models. Enactivist cognitive theories are not only compatible with active inference, but they rely on much of the same mathematical modeling functions such as Lagrange equations.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712319862774

You can use the word "pain" to refer to the external cause of pain if you like, but when I talk about pain in everyday conversation I'm talking about the feeling, not any external cause. — Michael

Why would I do that? That's not the way we use the word 'pain'. We use the word 'pain' to describe our subjective feeling. We use the word 'ovoid' to describe a property of some hidden state (an egg, for example).

We say "that egg is ovoid". We don't say "that needle is pain".

You're the one making the claim that our ordinary language use is wrong in the case of the egg, so bringing in 'everyday conversation' doesn't support your case.

Everyday conversation talks about external objects which have properties.

I have no clear idea what "ovoid" might be as distinct from either ovoid-as-seen or ovoid-as-felt. — Michael

Ovoid is a property of some hidden state which causes your 'ovoid-as-seen' and 'ovoid-as-felt'.

There. What's not clear about that?

The egg is ovoid, external things (i.e. waves/particles) aren't ovoid — Michael

This is just begging the question. External things are ovoid. They are just other shapes as well. Like the stars of Orion, the fact that they form a myriad other shapes does not mean they don't form the shape of a man with a bow.

You've not given an account of why external things (your 'waves/particles') must only form one shape. Just like you never gave an account of why they must only be one colour.

Because Putin has no warrant, no mandate, no cause whatever. He’s acting completely outside international law, he’s responsible for the deaths of millions, and to negotiate with him is to cave into terrorism. — Wayfarer

All true. So you think it's OK that other people die to uphold your personal moral code about not negotiating with terrorists?

What oddly sociopathic hopes you two have.

Wouldn't it be better if fewer people died?

For Ukraine to win, many, many more people will have to die. Ukrainian citizens, Russian 'slaves', Ukrainian soldiers (the 'free men').

A negotiated settlement with concessions on both sides would not require any more people to die. Why would you not want that?

It is self-evident to virtually everyone that if a person has done nothing, then they do not deserve to come to any harm.

That's not remotely controversial.

And it's not remotely controversial that if an act will create some undeserved harm, then that's a bad feature of an act - a feature that can be expected to create reason not to perform it, other things being equal.

It's not remotely controversial that procreative acts create a person who has done nothing.

It is the denial of any of these claims that would be controversial and apparently contrary to reason and thus that would require defence.

So the argument is valid and apparently sound. That's the very definition of a good argument. — Bartricks

This is indeed all valid and sound. It soundly proves that there is a negative aspect to procreation, that it creates a situation in which there will be undeserved harm which is a bad thing.

No explain why that is an argument for antinatalism.

Since literally all decisions are a weighing of positives and negatives, and you'd have to be moron to assume any decision in the real world were possessed of only one single factor, to make the above into an argument in favour of antinatalism, you'd have to show the badness you've identified is sufficiently bad to outweigh the goodness of the many other factors (plus the badness of some of those many other factors). As @Xtrix and others have pointed out, you can't have the goods of life without those harms, so you need to carry out this weighing exercise.

Otherwise all you've done is shown that prospective parents ought consider how much harm their children might come to as one of the factors when deciding whether to procreate. I don't think anyone would disagree with you there.

Connectionist models are just representations, so they are built for a reason other than the reason for which the thing represented was built, as they are built to represent that thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, they are not built to represent a thing. It's simply not what they do. They produce responses which minimise the surprise function of a prior prediction about the response under a particular policy. Nothing to do with representation. It's about prediction error in response, not representation.

Isaac, arguments concerning colour tend to be futile. — Banno

So I'm finding. And yet that's where these discussions tend to go (it seems safe ground from the anti-realist). I don't like squash either, but if it's the only game one's colleagues are willing to play, then one must either play it or play nothing. Discussion is a two person game and colour seems to be the topic of choice...

The neural net is not making a model that you then see with your mind. It is your mind seeing. — Banno

Spot on.

Look, you're clearly just a dogmatic materialist who hasn't got any interesting arguments to offer, just nay saying. It's boring. — Bartricks

I'm not here to entertain you. I'm here to point out the flaws in your argument If you don't want public critique of your arguments then I suggest you stop posting them on a public discussion forum.

Because it makes us feel good. It's the pleasure of a clear conscience: "I didn't cause harm to anyone." For some people, it's one of the highest pleasures there is. — baker

Do you think people would still feel that pleasure on a planet empty of all human life bar them? Would they look around a fell good that they're causing no harm? Personally, I doubt that, and what little information can be gleaned from isolation studies does not yield any evidence of contentment at having caused no harm.

Variance cause variance. — Joshs

Variance in what. There has to be medium for the variance to be a variance of.

Laws and patterned regularities are idealizations of continuous qualitative change. — Joshs

Change in what?

Of these potentially infinite variety of accounts... — Joshs

This is the assertion I take issue with. I see no grounds for believing it. That there exist multiple possible accounts is evident. I don't see any reason to conclude from that that the variety is near infinite, that's a huge and unwarranted leap (a near infinite one, in fact!). There are multiple accounts. That's all the data we have.

are you giving priority to a certain empirical account from physics? Is this a ‘bedrock’ account, as Quine claimed, one which grounds all the others in an irreducibly real beginning? — Joshs

I'm not personally giving priority to any particular account. I'm arguing that the range of possible accounts is constrained by the intrinsic properties of the hidden states of which they are an account. Physics need not even enter into it, these can be treated merely as hidden states in Markov nodal network system, no atoms or particles need be involved. Only information.

I think Wayfarer might agree that the way to bedrock is to begin by asking what all possible accounts of any aspect of the world have in common, that is , what is the condition of possibility of empirical account-building? — Joshs

Need they have anything in common?

linguistic conceptual accounts of the world are elaborations of practical perceptual interactions that are continuous with the role of niche building in non-linguistic animals under selective evolutionary pressure. I don’t think such models warrant taking an account from physics as normatively determinative. — Joshs

I agree.

Many people -- myself included at times -- want to take a generally good principle and universalize it, when every specific situation is almost always more complicated. I see this mistake in a broad range of activities, from monetary policy to poker playing. — Xtrix

Indeed. One of the perils, I think, of creating such a complex system as language is that it has the facility to create such grotesque castles in the air which we might then become so enamoured of for their intricate architecture that we'd rather not pay any attention to their gossamer foundations.

they scatter light at a wavelength of 650nm — Michael

An intrinsic property.

So I'd say "the postbox is red". You'd say " the wave particles you imagine are a postbox scatter light at a wavelength of 650nm"...

...and yours is the simpler explanation?

when someone has tetrachromacy or brain damage or the like then they respond differently to the same stimulus and so the quality of the emergent visual experiences are different, i.e they see different colours. — Michael

Nothing there contradicts what I've said.

your theory requires this “hidden state” invention — Michael

It's not my theory, it's called active inference, it's currently the leading theory of perception among cognitive scientists.

It’s overly complicated, there’s no evidence for it, and I would even say it’s incomprehensible. — Michael

It's the standard model now taught on most cognitive science courses, so it can't be that incomprehensible and with currently just over 160 papers in print on the subject I hardly think it lacks evidence. Perhaps if you're not an expert in cognitive science you might refrain from deciding arbitrarily what there is and isn't evidence for.

Something can’t be both all red and all blue. — Michael

So you keep claiming, yet still no argument to support it. Why can something not be both all red and all blue?

An even simpler example: fire causes most of us to feel pain. Pain isn’t some external “hidden state”; it’s a quality of our experience. Colour is of the same kind. — Michael

And yet we don't say the fire is in pain, we do say the fire is red.

People seem so bewitched by the complexity of visual experiences that they think sight works differently to other senses. — Michael

No people have spent decades studying the occipital neural circuits, modelling people's responses in different cases of brain damage, and directly experimenting on the occasional elective open brain surgery and have reached the conclusion that sight works thus.

And it's not that dissimilar to other senses in this respect.

We've concluded that we do not 'see' a model or a quale, or anything like that because there is absolutely zero evidence of any mechanism by which such observation could possibly happen in the brain.

Almost every human in the world agrees that the postbox in the village is the same colour as the bus.

We need an explanation for this extraordinary consistency.

We also have very, very rare cases where people disagree that two objects are the same colour.

The simplest explanation of the extraordinary consistency is that the colour is a property of some external state which we all interpret and the very, very rare cases are either mistakes or odd hidden states.

You're taking these extremely rare cases and saying that our entire explanation needs changing, an entirely fabricated notion of color experience needs to be proposed, without any physical evidence it even exists... Just to avoid the much simpler explanation that these rare cases are just that. Rare oddities.

the colour one sees is determined by how one’s brain responds to signals from one’s eyes. The same external stimulation but different colour experience. Therefore colours isn’t a property of that external stimulation. — Michael

The conclusion just doesn't follow. A hidden state might have the property of causing one response in person A but a different response in person B. That would still be a single intrinsic property of the hidden state. There's nothing at all preventing us from calling that property its 'colour'.

You're invoking this notion of a 'colour experience' without any warrant. There's no activity in the occipital cortex corresponding to a colour experience. There's no evidence for it at all, and there's bags of evidence against it (the vast majority of hidden states cause exactly the same responses in almost all humans - excellent evidence that the colour is a property of the hidden state, not the person's mind )

No, it’s a reason to believe that colour is in the head. — Michael

Why?

Because that's a contradiction. You might as well ask why something can't be both a rabbit and a duck. — Michael

Is it? I don't see that. A duck and a rabbit are two different sets of cells/organs. No one claims to see a duck where others see a rabbit (in real 3d objects) so we've no reason to assume anything can be both.

With colour, some people do claim to see blue where others see red, so that's default reason to believe that colour is the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time. We've no similar reason to believe species is such a property. If we did (half the world claimed some ambiguous object was a duck and half claimed it was a rabbit) then we'd have good reason to believe that species was the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time too.

The constellation Orion is in both the shape of a man with a bow, and the shape of a smiling cat. The shape of the constellation Orion is the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time.

If red and blue are different colours then it is a contradiction for it to be all red and all blue. — Michael

Why? Why can a dress not be two different colours at the same time?

Yep. I'm not asking about dresses which are part red and part blue. I'm asking about dresses which are both all red and all blue.

I haven't claimed that it cannot. — Michael

...

A red dress isn't a blue dress. — Michael

I'm asking for support for the above assertion.

A red dress isn't a blue dress. — Michael

So you keep saying, but you've not given any account of why a dress cannot be both a red dress and a blue dress.

Benefits good, but not enough. — Bartricks

Again this is a mistake made by confusing desert with outcomes.

You've argued that innocents deserve more benefits than they get. Procreation therefore entails a negative (it creates undeserved harms and fails to provide deserved benefits).

But procreation entailing a negative by failing to provide that which is deserved, doesn't in any way preclude it from entailing positives based on the benefits it does create.

The fact that those benefits are less than is deserved doesn't remove their goodness. Nor does it mean their goodness is outweighed by the badness of the failure to provide deserved benefits.

Consider I deserve a small medal, but I don't get one because I've been whisked away on an all expenses paid holiday to the Bahamas which I didn't do anything to deserve.

The badness of not getting the medal I deserve is far outweighed by the goodness of the holiday.

So all you have is that 1) procreation fails to provide the benefits it ought (bad).

2) Procreation does, however, provide loads of benefits (good).

You've not shown the bad at (1) outweighs the good at (2). You've shown the good at (2) is less than is deserved. That's not the same as it being less than the badness of not getting that which you deserve.

Are your sensations mental states? — Bartricks

No. Why are you asking these questions? A sensation is the response from a sensor. My sensations might be electrical stimuli in my retinal ganglia, or in my somatic nerve endings or some such. We might also use the word to refer to the 'sensation' thst there's someone behind me, for example. Without context I can't answer questions about what a word means. Words mean different things in different contexts.

I have sensations which are mental events. If that answers your question.

Maybe it can, but in this scenario it isn't. Neither person A nor person B sees a white and gold and black and blue dress. Person A only sees a white and gold dress. Person B only sees a black and blue dress. — Michael

Right. But how does that make it that the dress must be one or the other?

Is a sensation a mental state? — Bartricks

I've just answered that question. No. I don't think a sensation need be a mental state. I think a computer's response to a sensor could reasonably be called a sensation.

Do you know what other things being equal means? — Bartricks

Yes. Here it means "a bit of the argument I've left out because it undermines my conclusion".

If your conclusion relies on all other things being equal, then it is incomplete as an argument unless you show that all other things are, in fact, equal.

With procreation it is obvious they are not, since the possibility of some bad coming about is clearly not the only consideration and so clearly all other factors are not 'equal'.

Because neither white nor gold is black or blue. They are different colours. — Michael

But why can't a dress be two different colours at the same time?

A white and gold dress isn't a black and blue dress — Michael

Why not?

I'm directly quoting you. You said...

if you deserve no harm and come to harm, that's bad. — Bartricks

You then said...

None of that is controversial and it entails that we have reason not to perform procreative acts, ceteris paribus, as procreative acts create a person who deserves no harm but will inevitably come to some. — Bartricks

It doesn't entail such a thing because you've merely show that the situation is 'bad' (direct quote). We are not commonly obliged to avoid creating situations where something bad might happen. We do so unproblematically all the time. If I set up a rugby club it is almost inevitable that someone will get hurt. Getting hurt if you don't deserve to is bad. No one would say I had a duty to avoid setting up the rugby club in account of it meaning a bad thing was bound to happen.

We commonly accept that bad things sometimes come along as a consequence of situations we create for other reasons. It's not commonly seen as creating an obligation to avoid creating those situations.

I'm saying that if two people are seeing different things (one a black and blue dress, the other a white and gold dress) then they are not seeing the external state — Michael

Why not? I don't understand why you're invoking this rule that a hidden state has to have the same effect on all people at all times. Where does that rule come from?

And "meeting someone by the postbox" isn't an external hidden state. — Michael

Is anything?

But people see different things despite the same external hidden state, e.g some a white and gold dress and some a black and blue dress. Therefore it’s not the external hidden state they see. — Michael

Why? Why must the property of the external state we're labelling as 'green' be such that it causes the same response in all people at all times?

the postbox isn’t an external hidden state either. — Michael

Then when I say "I'll meet you by the postbox" I'm expecting you to get into my mind and wait next to my mental representation?

I didn’t realise that English grammar dictates/reveals the (meta-)physics of perception. — Michael

It reveals reference.

if you deserve no harm and come to harm, that's bad. — Bartricks

Yep.

it entails that we have reason not to perform procreative acts, ceteris paribus, as procreative acts create a person who deserves no harm but will inevitably come to some. — Bartricks

Nope. Just because something is bad, does not imply anyone has a duty to avoid creating situations in which it can happen. There's no precedent for that assertion.

You went from deserts (which do often carry accompanying obligations) to merely 'bad' (which don't).

It is merely 'bad' if a person who doesn't deserve harm comes to harm. That doesn't create an obligation on anyone to avoid creating that possibility.

If innocents actually deserved a harm-free life, then you might have a better argument that an obligation accompanies that desert, but you'll get very little agreement with that proposition.

Responding in the way called "seeing blue" is just seeing blue — Michael

Yes. Blue being the name given to the property we're seeing. The property of the external hidden state.

We have experiences, and we use words to refer to properties of these experiences. Colour, texture, pleasure, pain, and so on. — Michael

But we clearly aren't referring to the properties of the experience. When I say "the post box is red" I'm clearly referring to the post box. The grammar could not be more clear.

it's wrong to deny that in normal conversation they refer to something else; something that isn't hidden but instead is immediately apparent. — Michael

Again, 'hidden' here refers to the network location of the data node relative to the Markov boundary. It doesn't mean 'not apparent'.

Additionally, innocent people also deserve happiness. — DA671

Maybe. I know some people feel that way, but I don't think the feeling is as universal as feeling that innocents do not deserve harm. Some people have a more 'work for your reward' kind of attitude - you only deserve the happiness you worked for. Very Calvinist, not my cup of tea, but a strong belief in some cultures.

Since most people do seem to prefer existence despite the harms, it doesn't seem right to solely focus on preventing harms. — DA671

Yes, that's exactly it. Most people, given the choice, would take existence+harms over non-existence, so existence seems a far more important gift than the mere absence of harm.

And can sensations exist outside minds? — Bartricks

Possibly. I think it's moot. It wouldn't be incoherent to say that a computer sensor is receiving a 'sensation'. It's called a 'sensor' after all.

A person who hasn't done anything doesn't deserve to come to harm.
That's not controversial. You think it is. — Bartricks

Where have I disagreed with that proposition?

If someone deserves something but doesn't get it, that's bad. It's called an 'injustice'. Them's bad.
Other things being equal, we have moral reason not to perform acts that will create injustices. — Bartricks

Yep.

Acts of procreation create such injustices. — Bartricks

How so?

Acts of procreation create circumstances in which innocents might come to harm. Your first proposition is that innocents do not deserve harm.

You've not shown that someone getting something which they do not deserve is an injustice.

If I don't deserve a car, but get one anyway, no injustice seems to have occurred. I just got lucky.

So if I don't deserve harm, but get harm anyway, by what precedent do you conclude that an injustice has happened rather than just that I've been unlucky?

For your logic to hold, you'd have to either demonstrate that link or hold that innocents deserve the absence of harm. The latter is something with which very few people would agree.