If it means physically bringing another human into existence, it would violate non-aggression principle — schopenhauer1

A principle not everyone agrees with, without exceptions.

It assumes people pursuing happiness is more important than not bringing about conditions of negative experiences upon another person — schopenhauer1

Again, an assumtion many are happy to make.

I see no good ones on the other side — schopenhauer1

Of course you don't, because the 'goodness' of a reason is subjective. You think other people's reasons are not 'good', they think they are 'good'. Unless you have a definition of 'good' on which you both agree, no further progress can possibly be made can it... And yet you persist.

there is something to be said as to what should be important for all humans, being that we are all born for "some" reason (positive ethics). — schopenhauer1

But on what could we possibly base such an investigation? Having just established that what is important for humans is a mixed bag, and you having previously answered twice that any judgements can only be rendered on the basis of what is important to humans, how can we possibly make any progress determining what should be important to humans?

If we don't accept what actually is important to all humans as authoritative, then how can we possibly judge what should be important to all humans, when the only metric we have to make that judgement is what actually is important to all humans?

Again, just imagine an answer "what should be important to all humans is the opportunity to find happiness". What's wrong with that answer?

To humans, and I'm asking for what end. — schopenhauer1

This is the crux of the problem. Nothing at the level of rhetoric, where we now are, is important 'to humans'. Some things are important to some humans, other things are important to other humans, and there's no external judge to determine who's right and who's wrong about that.

And isn't 'persuing what I prefer' an end... the only end, in fact?

At some point in asking why people prefer the things they do, you have to defer to either their final say on the matter (usually "I don't know, I just do"), or you look to empirical evidence you see as correlating with unconscious desires (say sociology or human biology). Asking people is never going to get you further back than their own first principles, which could be almost anything.

You've just changed the words. What would constitue my having 'justified' it? — Isaac


That is precisely what I'm asking everyone. — schopenhauer1

It sounded like you were asking why people thought positive rather than negative ethics should have primacy, as if you already knew what kind of statement might constitue an answer.

If I said, in answer to your question "positive ethics should have primacy over negative ethics because I prefer positive ethics" would that be an acceptable answer for you? If not, what would be wrong with it?

A person only has to label it such and explain why more important than other ethical theories (in this case negative ethics) — schopenhauer1

No, if it's an ethical first principle there is no further underlying principle upon which to make any such measure of importance. Importance to whom and to what end?

The one that's true. — Marchesk

Truth is a property of propositions, not conceptual schemes, and in propositions, the translatability then becomes relevant again.

Sure, but which one? You may favour one and I may favour another for our different purposes. I'll see you down the pub when the rotation of the Earth reaches the point where this locality is such that the sun lies on a tangent to it, and we can discuss it. — unenlightened

Absolutely. It's horses for courses with your chosen scheme (although I don't think we have so much free choice over them as we'd like to think). I'm mainly concerned with maintaining their unique existence in the face of Davidson's march to homogeneity, rather than promoting any particular one.

Matters to whom and by what measure? — Isaac


Humans. Ethical first principles. — schopenhauer1

How are you determining that the primacy of positive ethics isn't itself an ethical first principle? Do ethical first principles have labels attached identifying them as such?

One where you would justify prevention of harm being less important than X positive ethic. — schopenhauer1

You've just changed the words. What would constitue my having 'justified' it?

The claim being made is that translatability equates to commensurability. I'm completely in agreement that the expressions translate in such a way that to use one or the other is irrelevant. What I disagree with is the idea that because they translate, the conceptual schemes from which they are drawn must be commensurable. In one conceptual scheme there is a link between wind direction and earth rotation, but in the other scheme there is no such link, nothing to translate because there's nothing there, yet something is lost/gained.

One scheme can therefore quite reasonably be considered 'better' than another (more elegant, more useful, more parsimonious...) without it having any bearing at all on the terms used to talk about aspects of that scheme. Words, after all (whole sentences even) can easily come to mean something completely different among a different group of language users.

I am proposing that it is only negative ethics that matters — schopenhauer1

Matters to whom and by what measure?

I do not see why this assumption must be true that negative ethics must give way to positive or that the positive necessarily needs to override the negative. Why would the prevention of suffering take a back seat to the promotion of "well-being"? — schopenhauer1

What would constitue an answer to this question?

What it's about is that 'the sun is setting' can be translated into Earth rotation talk perfectly well, and in fact you yourself have to make that translation in order to claim that it does not set, and so is just as truth-apt as the scientific language you erroneously claim is the only legitimate truth. You are trying to privilege a certain way of talking; don't! — unenlightened

Everyone seems to be conflating commensurability with translatability as if the two were equal.

'Sun setting' talk may well be translatable to 'earth rotation' talk, and 'prevailing wind talk' may well be translatable to 'coriolis force' talk, but in one conceptual scheme the two are linked. How do you translate that link without simply changing beliefs?

if your scheme is not intended to be true but merely predictive, then it's not a conceptual scheme of the sort being discussed here, and is irrelevant. — Banno

Maybe so, but if that's the case then the comment which drew me to this discussion in the first place is off mark. You claimed that "The idea of models is fraught, and ultimately fails, for reasons outlined by Davidson", so really I was looking, in this discussion, for some justification for that. The possibility that I'm talking about a type of model outside of the scope of Davidson's critique doesn't really tally with a claim that all talk of models ultimately fails. Is there some further discussion in some of Davidson's other works you can direct me to that covers the types of model I might be using?

Presuming for now the second of your options

if your scheme divides the world into stuff and what we do with it then it is based on a false premise. — Banno

Incommensurable and 'not translatable' are two different claims. If you follow a concept-scheme divide where content is the states of affairs in the world, then yes, it's difficult to see how incommensurable schemes could exist if translatable (the objects of reference being understood). But that only seems to work under that assumption. If, like Kuhn, we see the world as inaccessible directly, then the content of the schemes are perception related to (but not identical to) the actual states of the world. Thus, there'd be every reason to think translatability might be possible, but still have an incommensurable organisation of the sensory perceptions those schemes allow.

It is not that case that a scheme fitting a hidden state is that same as a scheme being 'true' in a Tarskian sense because truth in a Tarskian sense is not about correspondence (nor should it be - I'm quite happy with Tarski's definition). Truth, from a Tarskian perspective would be about translatability between experience and schema which would fall foul of Davidson's criticism and therefore lead to the a conclusion that the distinction must be discarded. But the sorts of models I'm talking about (and to be honest I think the one's Kuhn was talking about too, but I'm no expert on him), suffer no such problem, because the correspondence has nothing to do with truth of propositions, it has to do with behaviour - beliefs, dispositions to act.

the initial state ("what was said at the start of the game of whispers") don't matter, what matters for the equilibrium state is the action (the whisper mechanism) that iterates the random variables (the words) associated with each node (the people) and the architecture of the connection of the graphs (who speaks to who). — fdrake

Yes, this is exactly what we found, initial states are largely irrelevant. What I really want to do some day (but semi-retirement makes it an increasingly unlikely prospect) is to actually set up such an experiment. I had all these ideas about how we could do it with words, actions, I even had a way of trying it with opinions (comparative beauty judgement was my tool here).

The idea would be to see exactly what you were intimating about "beeb" and "boob", whether there were attractors which, once a sufficiently large error triggered a move to, were reluctant to leave. My hypothesis was that there would be such attractors and that they would tell us something interesting about the sort of error correcting mechanisms we use. I didn't know anything about Friston at the time, so my idea of error correction was far too linear, and should have been more probabilistic, but my instinct was that we'd have a method of 'correcting' what we thought were errors in communication which were themselves biased toward some presumption. With language that would be phonemes "I expect that was an 'ee', most words are", with opinions...well, that was going to be the interesting bit. Your statistical parsing is very helpful in pinning down how these connection might look in actual results.

I guess fundamentally the point of relevance is that humans are not just recipients of hidden states, we are creators of them. — fdrake

Probably only tangentially related (but then isn't everything we've been discussing - what was the actual thread topic again?). I did some work many years back on the unpredictability of social networks, how they create emergent states (strange attractors) for certain variables in a random way. Like a very long game of Chinese whispers with the players standing in a circle, after several thousand iterations the word is so far removed from it's original, it's almost unrecognisable, but, it's still a word, it's been constrained by the morphological field of language, not by the actual individuals.

Anyway, I was looking at the many variables of a social group which could be said to have emerged this way, rather than to be an actual intentional feature of any individual(or group of individuals).

I don't know if I'm just over-thinking it, but it seems possible to see these variables as 'hidden states' because none of us directly know what their causes are (we didn't deliberately make them), but they are nonetheless entirely created by the social group trying to infer what they are.

So there might not just be "one blanket", and it becomes activity and history dependent. — fdrake

Just reminded me of a paper by Peggy Series (I think) about nested Markov blankets and how they can be used to create wider network models - something like the 'extended brain' idea. It think it seems a very promising proposition.

Ahh. So the idea is that we might be able to construct linear-functionally related models (with or without noise?) of hidden states which bypass the function which relates those states to perception because we're no longer perceiving them directly, but through machines, and machines don't infer causes before reporting then, they just report them directly.

This is good because it gets to the heart of model-dependant realism as Hawking expresses it (he's talking almost exclusively about models in physics - like radiation, of course). It was the relationship between Hawking's idea and Friston's which interested me.

I agree with you that Friston's paper doesn't impact on that debate any further than to say that, if you buy model-dependant realism in physics, here's a good way to look at it in organisms too.

Apart from...

What are we to say about the observation of the reading from the Gieger counter? Obviously the actual sensory input is in terms of black numbers on a white background, but the reason that a certain shape becomes a 'dog' is because we have a model of 'dog' which somewhat matches a good possible cause of sensing that shape. Can we not say the same about the Geiger counter? What's the limit to the extent to which our inference of cause extends back outside the Markov blanket? Obviously we've no free-energy incentive to model anything more than one node outside the Markov blanket, but maybe, like with so many evolutionary traits, we've gone into overclocked mode with our inferences?

If any of this is helpful, then the next step is whether these non-perceptually constrained inferences have any necessary accompanying increase in the accuracy with which they match hidden states (noise reduction), and, more importantly, whether they match them with any exclusivity to other possible matches. My feeling is "yes" to the first, but "no" to the second.

I'm full of the most awful cold at the moment so that might be to blame for my mental fog, but, if you've time, I think I might need you to lay out (C) in a little more detail for me. I'm not quite sure what you mean by it (a lot of negations to keep track of - its does not entail...cannot be...which is not a function of...) it's a little more than my virus-addled brain can process, but since I'm doing nothing else today other than sitting in an armchair, I'd like to have a go nonetheless.

Other than that, the first part is perfect, that matches my understanding of the paper too. Just one query, your...

(B) All environmental states relevant to the organism's functioning are arguments of f or g (radiation stops this). — fdrake

... wouldn't radiation still have a function with regards to its causal relationship with environmental states? Does the stochastic nature of the event really pull much through to the environmental state thereby generated? Probably a minor point - but it might be important since it relates to (C).

You are talking about models of perception, yes? The notion that an organism builds an internal image of what is around it, in order to better choose pathways and so on? — Banno

Not entirely, you'd need to read the Friston paper to get a full idea, but I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, so I'll try to summarise. It's not that an organism builds and internal image of what's around it, so much as the organism has mathematical models of the likelihoods of various causes of the sensations which derive from what's around it. When I say model, I mean mathematical, or at least computational. Davidson seems to see conceptual schema (or at least the claim of conceptual schema which he is dismantling) as a filing cabinet with all the content (the way the world is) filed away. I see conceptual schemes more as rules for behaviour, not content-mediated at all. I don't think our brains are like libraries at all, they're inference machines, actively trying to minimise variance between expectation and sensation, so when Davidson concentrates of the 'storage' aspect (sorting and fitting) he's missing much of where computational neuroscience has gone nowadays

Mystical, hidden stuff... how do we talk about that? — Banno

Inference.

___

Really nice summary of the paper so far in your latest posts, thanks. If only every thread could go like that - interesting paper > clear exegesis > discussion - we'd have a marvellous forum.

Libertarianism would be the way to go - to limit centralized power. — Harry Hindu

What in this statement implies that a Libertarian would be for NO, as opposed to LIMITED, centralized power? — Harry Hindu

Everyone wants to limit centralised power. Who in the world wants to give central government all the power it is possible for a government to have... the power to tell you when to get up, what breakfast to have, what car to drive, who to marry, what clothes to wear...?

Libertarianism is bullshit because the only unifying aim is something everyone wants - the least imposition on freedom that still produces an acceptable society.

So the only thing that distinguishes so-called libertarians from any other more interventionist political persuasion is that they just care less about the stuff the government imposes on our freedom in order to get done.

A six year old could understand this. — I like sushi

As luck would have it, I happen to have ready access to just such a child right now in the form of a nephew (7). I'm afraid the response was "What?".

Garden variety indirect realist, then. — frank

Basically, yes.

Hidden states just refers to the fact that we don't have direct access to the causes of our sensations, they are caused by some hidden states of the world, which we can only infer using models. We meta-model things this way because our perceptions seem inconsistent (both intersubjectively, and temporally) in a manner difficult to explain by variations in points of reference.

if there are different schemes, the very idea of different schemes implies translatability. — frank

Yes, that's his conclusion, but his route there is via what he considers the relativist would have to say about the different schemes by reference to their content. That not making any sense is what leads him to reject the notion of different schemes. What he missed, however, is reference to hidden states, which makes a distinction between differences one can actually talk about (via a coordinating factor - perception) and differences one cannot talk about (not having access to the hidden states) but can nonetheless quite coherently speculate exists.

if there are differing conceptual schemes, would translatability be necessary? — frank

Davidson's point is that we couldn't possibly know they were different without some kind of translatability. To have "a sees p as x, whereas b sees p as y", we must have a 'p' for those two views to be about in order for us to see they are incommensurable, not just different aspects of one coherent theory.

Davidson thinks this means they must be translatable and so not really different according to his dissolution of the model/content distinction (his third dogma), but as I said earlier, that only applies to practice not theory. If 'p' were a hidden state, we could presume there were different models of perception, incommensurable in practice due to the lack of 'accessible' coordinating factor, but nonetheless definitely different by reference to the hidden state 'p'.

This certainly seems to tie in better with modern neuroscience than there being no models at all.

So you're saying our perceptual apparatus is directed at hidden states? Maybe. If I'm looking at the duck rabbit, I may be aware of the lines that make it up, but my senses lock into the rabbit as soon as I see it. — frank

Yes, that's how I see it. I cited a paper earlier in the thread all about it. Ideas about perception and models of reality based on inference from it seem to be cropping up in a number of related threads at the moment. If you're interested, I strongly recommend the paper.

Doesn't a conceptual scheme dictate what we call "real"? — frank

It does, but what we call real and the concept that there might be hidden states of affairs are two slightly different things. One is the actual content, the other merely the acceptance that there is some content.

Yes; this is what those who take conceptual schemes to be incommensurable must be asserting. — Banno

Pragmatically perhaps, but not theoretically, which is what Davidson is claiming. You're presuming there's only the possibility of a binary distinction between scheme and content (so if schemes ever are shown to be incommensurable, they must have a commensurable content of one and only one sort).

But this need not be the case. If we were to conceive (as I tried to convey earlier) of reality->perception->schema, then we have a co-ordination system 'reality' which nonetheless is not necessarily the content from which schema are built (perception), yet is linked to it.

how can we possible start talking about how light comes into the eye when we don’t actually experience sight as ‘light coming into my eye and sending signals to my occipital lobe’. — I like sushi

We do though, to some extent. If a car is racing toward me at great speed, my whole experience of the event might be a blur, and my body moving, little else. But if the car approaches more slowly, some part of that experience will be "that's a car", I might even recognise the make, bring to mind some facts about it, feel some repulsion to its colour etc.

Similarly, I don't see why some neuroscientific model of perception could not now form part of my experience of perceiving. To do so would require access to memory and higher cortex functions, so it's unlikely in fleeting stimuli, but no less a part of my experience when the stimuli is more drawn out.

Also, in terms of language, if I talk about the sunrise do you experience the sunrise. Of course you don’t, yet language almost convinces you that you’ve just experienced this said ‘sunrise’. Talking about something is the experience of talking about something not the experience of said ‘thing’. — I like sushi

Actually, they're mentally very similar. The same parts of the brain are involved in both, we're really just pasting on top of that an additional piece of information that tells us we're just imagining it. Obviously you're right, that additional factor makes it a different experience, but it says something about the idea of knowing "what it's like", there's not something so radically different going on in the 'experiencer', to that in the 'imaginer'

you’ll find yourself equally as stumped when it comes to articulating what it is to be a human assuming the question is redundant because you are one. — I like sushi

Yes, Hacker makes the same point in his dismissal of Nagel's argument.

Anybody who dares to contemplate engaging in that kind of behaviour, is at risk of getting unceremoniously terminated by their own relatives. You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. — alcontali

@Baden. This guy's been skirting around the edge of some pretty unpleasant stuff for some time, but this is open support for honor killing - enough is enough.

There's a distinction which I either keep failing to explain properly, or people don't generally seem to think useful, but it's crucially important to model-dependant realism, that is between reality having structures and reality being composed of the structures we divide it into.

I've used this example before, so apologies for the repetition if you've been following the whole thread, but it's like the constellation Orion. It definitely is in the shape (vaguely) of a hunter with his bow, belt and dagger, it's not that such structure isn't there, but it's also on the shape of just about anything else you could draw between those points, maybe not an infinite number of things (I'm not myself sure on this point), but certainly more than the one structure we impose on it out of that range of possibilities.

So to your point about reality having structural regularities which are 'real', yes, I think such regularities are not only only real, but necessarily so. If reality were homogeneous there would be no random direction to entropic forces and so no probability gradient against which the free-energy reduction would work. What I don't see is any reason why those structures must exist uniquely defined. So when you say "wavelengths picked up by the retina are coming from reality" I don't think there's any reasonable way we could disagree, but 'wavelengths' are themselves a concept, they're just one way of dividing energy among others. We can't even determine if wavelengths are a wave in a field or a particle, not that we've 'seen' either because both are just models interpreting numbers on a computer (which are the only thing we actually have 'seen').

Another metaphor might be to think of reality as a multi-dimensional contour map, it definitely has hills and valleys (ie it definitely exists and had variable structures), but which dimension should take precedent in determining what features are 'hills' is an arbitrary decision, or in our case, probably a pragmatic one limited by the biological hardware we've managed to evolve.

Really interesting point about reaching indeterminism in our models and what that means for how fundamental they are. I'm tempted to agree with you that indeterminacy cannot be further reduced, and so if we had it right this would not be one-pattern-among-many but would truly be the entity out of which patterns are made (like finding the actual stars in my Orion example). I'm wary to commit to it though because we'd have to remember that all this is within one huge Ramsey sentence about quantum physics, the first 'If' of which may well be wildly off mark.

What's fascinating about indeterminacy at the heart of the whole thing is that it might make our estimates of noise truly Gaussian (rather than just the assumption of Gaussian in our models) by the , at a fundamental scale, which is a point I think @fdrake made about central limit theory.

Thanks, I'm not sure whether to be reassured that some sub par posts are being caught before I read them or concerned that what remains is the actively filtered residuum.

Can I ask what the moderation was? Refusing it is obviously a banning offence but, I've encountered some pretty ornery behaviour here from time to time, I just wondered if people are frequently moderated, but just have the good grace to accept it, or if it takes more than ordinary pugnacity to incur the ire of a moderator.

Typically, properties are considered to be examples of universals, not particulars. — Pantagruel

No, many philosophers make use of the concept of Tropes, even pre Williams philosophers have Trope-like entities in their ontologies.

Curiously the same approach as the other post of yours I've just responded to. You post arose as a critique. It's all very interesting to hear what you think, but if you post in response to a specific quote it's read (perhaps erroneously) as indicating that you specifically disagree with that quote, in which case what we'd be looking for is some reason why. Just declaring that an alternative could also be the case doesn't really tie in with the quote.

What I'm saying is really simple (at least it seems so to me), but your response suggests that you can't even grasp it. — Terrapin Station

I'm not having any trouble grasping what you're saying, but your opinion here did not first arise in answer to the question "what do you think", it arose as a critique (and quite a strong one) of alternative positions. It is in that context I'm confused.

As such, what would be required to alleviate my confusion is not simply a clear exposition of what you think, but an explanation of why you feel it is necessary to think that, why the alternatives are untenable.

All you've done here is made a series of bare assertions.

Attitudes are already interconnected – causally, semantically and epistemically – with objects and events in the world — ZzzoneiroCosm

How would this be the case when we only have access to those objects and events via our perceptions which themselves are shaped and dependent on schema? I don't 'see' a load of photons, I 'see' a dog, because I'm expecting a dog to be there. Even if there's something missing in the actual photons hitting my retina, some optical illusion, I'll still see a dog. But not if I've no concept of a dog, then I won't be fooled by the illusion, I'll 'see' something else instead.

Great summary, thanks for doing that.

It is strange that conceptual schemes which are posited as incommensurable nevertheless can be contrasted in the forms they give to experience. — fdrake

This is the first part I take issue with. He's presuming in this that we successfully contrast them, as distinct from merely making a satisfactory attempt to do so. The long and drawn out debate over some topic could be seen as contrasting the forms (or, as he later discusses, translating the schema), but they could equally be used as evidence of a complete failure to do so. If we deduce that something here must be amis, it could be any element, one of which is the idea that anything at all can be said about our success in contrast/translation sufficient to draw clear conclusions about how beliefs are held.

It is furthermore not a mere revision of belief (X believes that P mapping to X believes that not P), because truth or falsity of a proposition given an interpretation thereof is fully within the scope of the first conceptual scheme. It is a transformation of meaning rather than a revision of belief. — fdrake

I think this conflates truth values of propositions with beliefs. Obviously on the face of it Davidson is perfectly right, one can revise X=P, to X!=P by changing the meaning of rather than the actual belief, but this doesn't demonstrate that the belief about P hasn't changed, merely that a changein the proposition expressing it is not a sound indicator of whether it has or not.



But my main misunderstanding is what he's using to get from translatability/common reference to ditching conceptual schemes altogether. We're all human, we've all got the same sensory organs with which we perceive the world, we have a pretty similar history (in evolutionary terms)... Is it any surprise our conceptual schemes are similar enough to at least give the impression of translatability? Nothing in that leads to saying we don't have any, especially with the weight of cognitive theory to the contrary which would have to all be re-thought if we're to accept this framing.

what more could I say? — Banno

...

Perhaps you could , in preference to quoting, give a summary of the argument you think lead him to that conclusion, so that I've got something to go on — Isaac

But, as I said, if you're not interested, that's fine, just have to say so.

It's possible, to remove sections from your 'all discussions' page. I just have the religion section turned off, so I only go there knowing what I'm getting into.

That said, I think the decision to keep the Lounge off the public front page is a good one in terms of the kind of people it would be good have on board. We should present a more serious face, I think, and the plethora of stupid theism/atheism discussions are not helping. That said...

You could say the same thing about discussions elsewhere on the forum, with the same justification. — SophistiCat

...is the point. I don't mind the number of threads of (what I think of as) poor quality discussion (also some really good ones in the past have petered out, or deteriorated into garbage), but it would be nice to have something like the (lounge/not lounge) distinction for serious/not serious discussion. We could have a fairly simple rule that the discussion should be about some published paper, which participants should have read, that would be relatively incontestable (so not require a huge increase in moderator effort) and should clear out a lot of the garbage.

Or in other words, classes/kinds/types are simply a matter of how we want to conceptualize things, how we want to divide them up. — Terrapin Station

Hang on, weren't you quite vociferously arguing against model dependant realism only a few days ago, the idea that people don't objectively exist being nonsense? Now you're saying the opposite, that grouping some particular set of entities into a containing class is just a matter of how we conceptualise things. If grouping all lumps of quartz just because they the property {being a certain size range} and calling them 'sand' is just our conceptualising, then why is grouping certain collections of cells together just because they have they have the property {some specific type of connectivity} and calling them a 'person' somehow not just our conceptualising?

No — Banno

If you're not interested, you can just say so. I'm not handing in an question paper to be marked, I'm contributing to a discussion. If you can't even be bothered to write a proper reply then just don't reply. Replying just to get some condescending dismissal in is just rude.