We need to see the rabbit as a duck - better, to see that we can see it either way. — Banno

I totally agree with this. We make dominant pictures optional. But to do so requires that we make them visible in the first place. Perhaps the primary force in philosophy is dragging such pictures from the darkness in which they operate.

...as if there were such as thing as "the meaning of..."

That picture has us enthralled. — Banno

Indeed! And we can only talk about that picture from within that picture. We can only bring down the house with the stuff we find inside. We are always thrown into a way of talking. We don't control it. We inherit it. We can only question it in terms that it has forced on us.

As I said before, I am tempted to put all of my terms in quotes, but that would annoy people. Along the same lines, it's just part of my blind skill to use 'I' and other mentalistic words as I try to criticize this mentalistic picture. Note that Rorty also stresses the dominance of pictures. In our haughty rationalism we don't notice that our framework is nothing but a picture...that language is a mirror or an eye...as opposed to a hand or something else. We think in metaphors, and flies in bottles and disposable ladders are doing the work for us.

Incidentally, I think Derrida is very much a posturing charlatan -- just as Zikek is now -- and I've tried hard to understand him. — Xtrix

I don't want to derail your thread to defend Derrida...but my connection was through Limited Inc and Dreyfus's interpretation of the who of everyday dasein. Witt's beetle-in-the-box passage is also crucial.

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant — Witt

To me this passage just destroys our mentalistic assumptions. We don't have some isolated subject gazing on Platonic meanings. The inside is outside. For the most part we are no one, and it's only by being this no one of linguistic conventions that we can invent the mentalistic talk. Derrida uses 'iterability' to get at this. So in some the way it's a question of the being of language --which is also a being-in-the-world, since the 'inside' is 'outside.' You can imagine how this fits into 'the water we swim in' and our inherited pre-interpretation of existence, of being here. 'Consciousness' is a sign in the game. We can't say what consciousness 'means' by futility gesturing to an 'inside' that is also one more linguistic convention. The 'illusion' or assumption is that there is some spiritual-mentalistic occurent entity that overhears itself perfectly, perfectly in touch with purely subjective meaning.

I'll shut up about Derrida if this doesn't whet your appetite. To me there's a whole sequence of thinkers who were on to this issue, the being of language and the social.

I'm really only interested in opinions of those who have made a real effort to read him, hence my request in the OP that a requirement should be having read Being & Time. If you can't get through that, that's fine -- not you're cup of tea. But then why bother announcing your disapproval? — Xtrix

Yup. And rejecting Heidegger is to some degree rejecting all of the scholars who have taken Heidegger seriously. So Heidegger is a fraud ==> Dreyfus is a fraud ==> Braver is a fraud ==> etc. To me it's a bit like conspiracy theory. Lots of famous people being influenced and interested is of course no proof that Heidegger or whoever is great, but it might give one pause. At the same time the thrill is not being fooled. 'That fad didn't suck me in. I'm too shrewd.' I don't know if we are ever done deciding if we are lying to ourselves in either direction.

I do know that life passes quickly, that I've spent 20+ years reading philosophy and not getting paid for it (working at something else for a living), and I still don't claim to have mastered any major thinker. Personally I think we short-lived mortals always die in our ignorance. I still can't claim to have always had the modesty for silence. In some ways it's good to spout prejudice and overhear oneself, perhaps. Maybe we always spout prejudice, which is not to say that all prejudice is equally desirable.

I do notice that the Heidegger haters have stopped by. I don't blame them. But I suggest that thinkers like Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida...the ones that people love to who hate...can be appreciated without being worshiped or endorsed as a whole, as flawless human beings or philosophers. I think we can safely enjoy them piecemeal, if necessary. We take what we can use.

Indeed, we are probably already always doing that as we try to fit the past into our own futures. I hope this adds to the thread. One can tell that he was a student of Heidegger.

Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutical priority Gadamer assigns to prejudgment is also tied to Gadamer’s emphasis on the priority of the question in the structure of understanding—the latter emphasis being something Gadamer takes both from Platonic dialectic and also, in Truth and Method, from the work of R. G. Collingwood. Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudgment in understanding connects directly with Gadamer’s rethinking of the traditional concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not merely explication, but also application. In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out of which it arises.

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn. While Gadamer has claimed that ‘temporal distance’ can play a useful role in enabling us better to identify those prejudices that exercise a problematic influence on understanding (Gadamer acknowledges that prejudices can sometimes distort—the point is that they do not always do so), it seems better to see the dialogical interplay that occurs in the process of understanding itself as the means by which such problematic elements are identified and worked through. One consequence of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice is a positive evaluation of the role of authority and tradition as legitimate sources of knowledge, and this has often been seen, most famously by Jürgen Habermas, as indicative of Gadamer’s ideological conservatism—Gadamer himself viewed it as merely providing a proper corrective to the over-reaction against these ideas that occurred with the Enlightenment. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/

It does. The "water we swim" is exactly right -- it's right there around us at all times, and for just that reason is the last thing we notice. The method of "unconcealing" these hidden features of life is how I see him defining phenomenology. — Xtrix

Excellent. I agree with all of that. I've been talking about consciousness in other threads, and I think it's close to the issue of being. People use familiar words in a loose way without noticing just how haze these words are. For practical purposes that's fine, but philosophers build metaphysical systems on foundations of fog. I like to think of it as dragging our ignorance into the light.

What's blind about it? The term's an odd choice. — Banno

It's the way that words just pour out of us in situations. We react appropriately, like we are riding a bike. I think of someone writing a dictionary as looking around at what happens and squeezing out the least wrong summary that he can, and I understand as like a work of translation.

Along these lines, the same word used in a million different instances has a million different 'meanings.' You and I could look at these individual cases and perhaps agree on some further elaboration. We could talk about what the word means in exactly that context (ignoring that fact that we're never in exactly that context but only imagining). As we did so we'd be using the same blind skill. The words would pour out from nowhere, with more or less hesitation or rewriting. So the skill is blind as taste is blind, though of course we do create fresh words to articulate/elaborate aesthetic reactions.

Dreyfus was an excellent teacher. I'd check out his Berkley lectures as well -- they're online (YouTube et al) for free. His Being-in-the-World is valuable. — Xtrix

His chapter on the 'who of everyday dasein' is perhaps my favorite. 'One' uses words this way or that way, automatically. Any attempt to make this know-how explicit is a fresh use of our blind skill that can never dominate that skill and always depends on it. That's very roughly my attempt to hint at the intersection of Heidegger/Wittgenstein for me.

I also have studied Gadamer a little bit, and I love what he does with Heidegger. I love the idea of forehaving or preinterpretation or interpretedness. To me the thrown-ness idea is potent.

'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' (Joyce) Or we are the history from which we are trying to awake. It's only our prejudices that allow us to think against such prejudices. The most potent prejudices are the ones we don't know we have. What is ontically closest is ontologically farthest. It's the glasses we don't know we are wearing, the water we swim in without noticing until a strong philosopher can make it visible and only then optional.

I'm riffing, but hopefully some of this speaks to you.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. — link

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

I like this 'just another metaphor' criticism, but it also applies, I think, to 'consciousness.'

I'm not sure that we are ever done understanding anything. So for me it's a search for further clarity and the revelation of the apparently necessary as the contingently familiar and automatic. This second task is making darkness visible, dragging our ignorance into the light.

[Bitbol seems interesting, but I haven't studied his work.]

(And still is, presumably.) A machine with a sense of / illusion of consciousness? Agreed. He himself would of course reject "illusion of", and even "sense of" except in the narrower sense of "accurate sense of". Not "machine": he embraces that. — bongo fury

Cool. Well I'd like to hear more about that. I mostly know Searle through his rhetorical war with Derrida. IMV, Derrida was making the kind of point that I'm trying to make, dissolving some pure subject or consciousness into social linguistic conventions. Searle came off (to me, in that context) as leaning on the prejudices of common sense, etc. [And for those who hate Derrida, in Limited Inc he writes more like an analytic philosopher than a continental, IMO. (So it's a good entry point for skeptics.)]

Yes, he might be wrong trusting that kind of intuition... but... be right about swimming in something semantic: namely, the social game of pointing symbols at things. — bongo fury

OK. I guess my point is that if we ultimately reduce 'semantic' to pointing symbols...that at some point AI may satisfy our intuition. Consider the movie Her. And consider that we never prove that others have some secret interior in which they gaze on meanings. We just 'know' it, which is to say that we love them, treat them a certain way. On the other hand we show no mercy to roaches, and very little to pigs, even if they are smarter than animals that we do treat kindly...probably because we respond to human-like faces, which fire up a kind of nurturing or one-of-us instinct or feeling.

I can think of better things to be dissolved into. — Wayfarer

Indeed! Dissolving the subject into distributed social conventions offends us. The subject plays a huge role in moral/political discourse. We can think of the evolution of the notion of the soul, where 'consciousness' is a last secular holdout in some sense. In any case, we don't have to want to be dissolved this way to follow certain arguments in that direction. Now lots of thinkers have made arguments against traditional notions of consciousness, but this one is particularly concentrated:

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein

I also addressed as fascinating response to this passage above.

the point I’m making is simply that humans are designated ‘beings’ for a reason, and part of the implication of that is to distinguish beings from things, objects, or devices. — Wayfarer

Indeed, there are certainly historical reasons, presumably political and moral. But there were reasons for slavery, infanticide, etc. Such reasons aren't necessarily reasonable by our standards here and now.

As regards the concept of the subject, I respectfully submit that subjectivity, or better, subject-hood, is not a concept per se but a fundamental existential reality which is logically prior to conceptual thought. To say that is not to malign conceptualisation in the least, but to draw attention to logical priorities. A major point about scientific method is that it starts by ‘bracketing out the subject’. But forgetting that it has done this is the beginning of scientism. — Wayfarer

On the first point, perhaps. I posted on this above referring to a related point. I'm not so sure about the second point. I'll just say that my philosophical influences and approach are anti-scientism, where scientism is understood as bad philosophy pasted on to mere prediction and control.

Is there a thorough historical analysis of the problem of consciousness? One that, for example, links the disappearance of general animism with sedentism and agriculture and continues the plot up to now? — Heiko

That would be great. I think we see less ambitious versions of that kind of narrative here and there.For instance, Rorty traces the use of the subject in philosophy in PMN.

The distinction which can be found, between the ideas of subject and object, and to which many attest, is I believe, and such as you assert, also, a product of convention, yet nonetheless essential for structuring of the ability to know, to conceive; a heuristic of sorts, whose significance can scarcely be overstated, that enables the mind to recognize itself as agent, as capable of guiding the whole of its own actions, absent any extraneous influence, and thereby attaining freedom of choice, and thought. — Vessuvius

I can agree with you on this. We are just unlikely to ever put subject-talk aside. It's too basic for our form of life. So abolishing the subject is not a live option. I agree. On the other hand, we can as philosophers do as you just did, and think of the 'I' or 'consciousness' as caught up in especially basic or foundational conventions.

Note the connection to 'freedom of choice' and implicitly to responsibility. A body is trained to take responsibility for its self. This is tied up with reward and punishment. Children aren't held to the same level of responsibility for their actions. Alcohol complicated consent to sex, etc. So in practice we have a continuum of consciousness, agency, responsibility. No doubt.

The issue is whether we want to reify these important conventions into some quasi-mystical substance and get trapped in the old metaphysical maze.

...hence, "shown". — Banno

Do you mean something like lived?

That implies there is something "outside of our blind skill ". There isn't. We can't say what cannot be said... — Banno

I'm tempted to agree with you. The thought of blind skill threatens the philosophical project. The fantasy is that we can take some position on the outside and legislate. The insight, if we want to call it that, is that metaphysics (including theory of knowledge) is impossible. But all of these words are caught up in that same blind skill, in conventions and slippage that can't be controlled from the outside, some dry room from which we peep down on the storm.

Which is a problem with those systematisers, Heidegger for one, who would say despite this — Banno

Heidegger is easy to hate, and I hate him half of the time. But he's also great at times. I guess he is systematic during some phases, but at other times he's highly anti-systematic. I like him as a critic, as a destroyer of metaphysics based on the subject. What Braver does to connect Heidegger and Wittgenstein in Groundless Grounds is pretty great.

So, I'm curious...

How do you account for the belief of language less creatures? — creativesoul

I don't have some finished theory and doubt I ever will. I think that we humans have patterns in our marks and noises embedded within broader patterns. Our talk of belief is part of this. Our making sense of animal belief is part of this. It all functions as a whole, and we are trained into a kind of blind skill for acting within these conventions. For instance, what does it mean to 'account for'? Of course we have a rough sense. Roughly, accounting for something means making it familiar, more manageable, weaving it in to our larger stories.

I think we tend to project some trimmed-down version of our intra-human mentalistic langauge on animals. I'm not even against that. It's more about revealing this or that approach as optional, to some degree just for the intellectual pleasure.

Pavlov's dog involuntarily slobbering after hearing the bell shows us, along with his path towards the food bowl, that he thinks, believes, and/or expects to be fed. — creativesoul

I understand what you mean, I think, but the point I'm making that is that describe slobbering after hearing the bell in terms of expectations and beliefs. Maybe you'll agree? The so-called expectation just is the behavior. It is not implied or demonstrated by the behavior. Or rather it's not clear what talk of this implication adds.

We're actually in the process of demonstrating exactly what I've been advocating. We're each drawing correlations between different things in an attempt to build a bridge of mutual understanding... shared meaning. — creativesoul

I'm inclined to agree. We are behaving in a certain key, adjusting certain linguistic conventions. Is our typing this or that word radically different from the dog salivating?

Behaviour is not thought. Behaviour is a result thereof. Roughly, of course. — creativesoul

I agree that we often think of non-linguistic behavior as caused by linguistic behavior. The creature did one thing because he thought another. I'm exploring the approach of treating linguistic behavior as on the same plane as all other kinds of behavior. We can still postulate a causal relationship between a creature saying X to himself and then acting in this or that way. We can find a suicide note explanatory, for instance, by linking one kind of hand movements to another (writing 'This world is evil' and tying a noose.)

You said 'roughly, of course,' so perhaps you are open to this or include this already.

However, you then claim that there is no doing away with common usage of "think", and I assume the use of "believe" and "belief" as well. While you're correct in that there may be no doing away with it, we can show where it fails.

Are you asking if thinking is distinct from behavioural patterns? — creativesoul

That's pretty close. I'm saying that we prioritize a certain kind of behavior as special, call it 'thinking.' But what is thinking? Making sounds and noises according to certain conventions or patterns. These days we can just imagine making these sounds. We have interior monologues. For reasons that are somewhat historical/political we often lean on some vague notion of free will, think of our thinking as ghost with a certain freedom to move the body this way or that.

because I doubt very many will have read his other works and exclude that from the list. — Xtrix

Very true! I found B&T quite difficult. It's huge, rich, and a bit overwhelming. So naturally I looked for help, found out about earlier lectures and shorter, earlier drafts. That really helped open my eyes. I could go back and read lots of Div One especially feel that I was getting it. I found Dreyfus's Being-in-the-world quite helpful, but there are some great papers in the Cambridge Companion too. I'm pretty fond of Kisiel's and Van Buren's work too.

Well then, welcome! — Xtrix

Thanks!

Also, just to put this out there, I like to think of Wittgenstein pointing to language as a ready-to-hand tool that we tend to try to gaze at as something occurent. (Our blind skill with language is more absent than present, perhaps...)

Other beings are more than just like us - each of them is 'I', from inside their perspective. — Wayfarer

So it seems, and I feel quite connected to animals. What I'm questioning is the vague use of this 'I.' Splitting 'what is' into subject and object looks linguistic and cultural. We can dissolve 'I' into an ocean of speech act conventions.

And solispsism is really a bizarre notion to seriously entertain, isn't it? — Wayfarer

Indeed, and I've argued against it recently. In some sense I'm arguing against it now. Mentalistic talk presupposes a mind that only interacts with other minds indirectly. Playfully speaking, I'm not doubting whether others are real...I am doubting if 'I' am real. 'I' mean that our use of the word perhaps misleads us to posit some entity, composed of some ineffable substance.

After all, humans are called 'beings'. I think this is taken for granted at our peril. There's a deep reason for it. — Wayfarer

That is not at all an argument. If you know some deep reason, please share.

So the fact that the subject is not something objectively discernable, doesn't mean that it can simply be disregarded or glossed over, although that is pretty much what eliminative materialism, positivism and behaviourism wish to do. — Wayfarer

I can't speak for other (amateur) philosophers, but I'm interested in specifying the 'concept' of the 'subject' -- which clearly exists in some vague sense. In case it helps, I'm not interested in reducing mind to matter or matter to mind. That whole approach seems flawed to me. The world or reality is not 'really' or 'fundamentally' anything. Or that's not my project. I do think that mentalistic talk often obscures the exteriority of human cognition --that we are more outside than inside in a certain sense, that we are intelligible to ourselves even in terms of public conventions. So embodiment and sociality are themes, but none of this is reduced to 'matter.' Pure 'non-mind stuff' is just as problematic as 'pure mind stuff.' In both cases proponents find themselves gesturing helplessly toward the ineffable.

If it can't be fitted with the procrustean bed of naturalism, well, then, it can be disregarded. But the point about the 'transcendence of the subject' is actually another facet of the hard problem of consciousness. — Wayfarer

To me this is a philosophical issue, and we might talk of two opposite metaphysical paradigms that from my perspective both make the same constructivist mistake. I am interested in the transcendence of the subject, and the ideas I've been discussing here were influenced by philosophers, many of whom scientistic types tend to despise. I am very much interested in and even arguing for...a different kind of transcendence of the subject.

Then I would say it probably understands things, but not necessarily that it's conscious. I don't have a great model for what it takes for something to be conscious yet, so wouldn't know when to apply what metric for that. — InPitzotl

Right. And I don't have a great model either. I guess my big point is that humans use the word 'consciousness' in a hazy way that AI encourages us to question and specify.

Here's a relevant quote from a nice sketch of the beetle-in-the-box argument against private language. I think it zeroes in on the issue.

However, there's more to a pain than our knowledge of it. It has both an ontological and an experiential status. We can also accept the fact that any ontological and experiential status the pain does have will itself be coloured by public language. (For one, those parts of public language which have given us the tools and concepts to think about a pain’s ontological and experiential status!) Though, yet again, there's still something about pain that's above and beyond its epistemic position and its ontological and experiential status. There's a state - a pain - that's the subject of all these public expressions. These public expressions are about something other than themselves. They're about pain. — link

http://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/2015/10/comments-on-wittgensteins-beetle-in-box.html

Note that he talks of 'we.' He just knows that we all know pain. [The primary 'subject' is plural, is we?] And I won't pretend that I don't know what he's talking about. And yet he's talking about what slips through language entirely. He could use the notion of pure redness or the feeling of hot water in the bathtub. It's whatever we can't squeeze into a public language. He just knows we all have it. Why? What if some human did not have it but participated in the convention anyway? It seems that it's just part of the vague meaning of 'being human.' There's a sort of animal faith that others that look like me and act a certain way must possess access to something radically private. I am supposed to have direct access, ineffable access to my own 'mind' and 'pain.' (I am tempted to agree, but the issue is complicated. 'I' had to learn to use the word 'I' according to certain conventions.)

The biggest issue is perhaps the idea of some 'experience of meaning' behind or accompanying saying the right things, making speech acts in accordance with conventions. If the robot says 'I am conscious,' we don't believe 'it.' We have our reasons for not believing. But why do we believe that our fellow meat-puppets are conscious? It's a tangent, but I think that I am 'we' before 'me,' that the individual is in some sense not the bottom layer. We are socialized before we can develop a specialized surface one might say.

The ability to plan behaviors directed towards and manage to successfully attain a goal of getting chips and dip. — InPitzotl

Fair enough, but what if AI acts at a human level ? It may never happen, but let's imagine a Blade Runner scenario. At what point do we finally wonder how strong the difference is? We are whittled down to an unspecifiable something that distinguishes us.

to simply presume this comes out of a social construct requires an argument. — InPitzotl

True, and I think there are biological constraints on what culture can manage.

I know, and such is apparently the trend here, but I feel like too often discussions about AI become hand wavy. — InPitzotl

I could have been more careful. I've been talking about AI in other threads and took too much for granted.

Indeed it is, but that's a different question. You're asking a few of them! — InPitzotl

Yes, ..I do have more questions than answers. That's for sure.

Everyday events count as more than adequate ground. We just have to know what to look for. — creativesoul

Well in everyday terms I do think that my cat thinks. Some of this is just empathy. Conceptually it seems to be an extension of the usual hypothetical entities, thoughts which can never be measured or touched. In some sense attributing thoughts might be a fancy way of describing tangible behaviors.

There is a causal relationship between touching fire and the sudden onset of pain. That relationship need not be thought about. — creativesoul

I agree, but talk of pain is maybe not as good as talk of behavior that we associate with pain or interpret as pain. 'Pure' pain is the beetle again.

So not only do I agree that the relationship need not be thought about, I suggest that even worrying about thought at all might muddy the water here.

Drawing a correlation between touching fire and the onset of pain is not... that is belief formation about(the content of which is) the fire and the pain. — creativesoul

Intuitively, yes. I understand you. But why not notice a relationship between touching a hot coal and suddenly withdrawing the paw? Then we can notice that the creature stops touching hot coals. Or touches them less often. Is there more to belief formation? Especially for languageless creatures?

Our views may be closer than I thought, but...

You're projecting mentalism onto it. — InPitzotl

Look here in this new answer:

Well, there's an apparent singularity of purpose; this body doesn't seem to arm wrestle itself or reach in between the two options. And there's a continuity of perspective; when this mind recalls a past event it is from a recalled first person perspective. So there's at least a meaningful way to assign singularity to the person in this body. — InPitzotl

That's pretty mentalistic, and you say 'apparent' about something that is basically like 'your red.' And then that's a 'meaningful' way to assign singularity. Don't get me wrong. I also have the intuition that I am a single consciousness. But I'm suggesting that this is trained into us. We just learn to talk this way.

I would, for those symbols, if "correctly" means semantically. — InPitzotl

And you are reducing 'correctly' to 'semantically.' You are saying (I think) that our android did it right if it understands. I am saying that it 'understands' if it did it right. What does meaning add to reacting to 'get the chips' by getting the chips?

But we social constructs use language to mean the things we use language to mean. And a CR isn't going to use chips and dip to mean what we social constructs use chips and dip to mean without being able to relate the symbols "chips and dip" to chips and dip. — InPitzotl

I'm suggesting that getting the chips having been told to is relation enough. I suggest that humans demonstrate 'understanding' in the same way. I can't look into your mind space and compare your idea (whatever those are) to mine. All we can do is synchronize behavior, including the speech act of saying 'he understands.'

We don't need to know what 'know' means, or rather the sound 'know' is 'understood' if we use it according to certain conventions. (We don't need to 'know' what 'mean' 'means' either. And yet we are sure that AI can't 'know.') (How do we know that we're not bots too?)

Also, yeah,I was using the Turing test metaphorically, extending its meaning.

Anyway, I'm enjoying our conversation. This is great stuff.

Some key characteristics of humans are rationality and self-awareness. Aristotle said man was 'a rational animal' which I still think is quite sound. — Wayfarer

Indeed, the rational animal...which is to say in some sense the spiritual animal. Our distinction of ourselves from the rest of nature is dear to us. I think we tend to interpret a greater complexity in our conventional sounds and noises as a genuine qualitative leap. Of course that can't differentiate us from A.I., or probably not in the long run. We may convert an entire planet into a computer in 4057 and feed it all of recorded human conversation. It (this planet) may establish itself as 'our' best philosopher yet. It might be worshiped as a God. It could be that charming, that insightful.

I suppose some line can be drawn in terms of 'being that knows that it is', in other words, can truthfully say 'I am'. (This is why Isaac Asimov's title 'I, Robot' was so clever.) Whatever it is that says 'I am' is never, I think, known to science, because it never appears as an object. Rather it provides the basis of the awareness of objects (and everything else). — Wayfarer

Indeed, and we get to the center of the issue perhaps. What we seem to have is a postulated entity that is by definition inaccessible. It never appears as on object. I do think this is a difficult and complex issue. But I also think that it assumes the subject/object distinction as fundamental. At the same time, one can make a case that subject/object talk is only possible against a background of social conventions. In other words the 'subject' must be plural in some sense. Or we might say that the subject and its object is a ripple in the noises and marks we make.

Can a dolphin say something like 'I am'? I don't know. Must the subject be linguistic? The subject seems to play the role of a spirit here. The old question is how 86 billion neurons end up knowing that they are a single subject, assuming that we have any kind of clear idea of what such knowing is. If we merely rely on the blind skill of our linguistic training (common sense), then we may just be playing along in taken-for-granted conventions. By the way, I'm know that I am partaking in such mentalistic language. It's hard to avoid, given that I was trained like the rest of us and therefore am 'intelligible' even if the species decides later that it was all confusion.

Saying that we know, as a result of enough testing results/data, that some creature or another will probably act this or that way when presented with the same scenario, is all fine and good.

There is no ground for claiming that the creature thinks in probabilistic terms... at least not language less ones. — creativesoul

I agree. There is no ground, in some sense, for saying that the creature thinks at all. There is, in some strange sense, no ground for saying that humans think probabilistically. Does consciousness even exist? In the everyday sense, of course. My issue is whether 'thinking' has some deep meaning beyond patterns in behavior. What does it add? That's the beetle, as I see it. At the same time, we obviously know how to use words like 'think' with the usual blind skill. So there's no doing away with that. We can only question the mentalistic paradigm from within that paradigm. Does it lead us down dead ends philosophically?

A sign is related or correlated to a response — path

I did not say that though.

A sign becomes such as a result of being part of the correlation. — creativesoul

I don't understand the difference. Becoming correlated/related is becoming part of a correlation. To be related is to be in relationship. That's how I understand it.

Well, I've not been using such language. However, the language I've been using effectively exhausts all 'mind' talk I am aware of. Human thought and belief make for good subject matter(s). — creativesoul

Indeed, and I don't think we can even help talking mentalistically. It takes serious effort to avoid it just a little. At the same time I think it's interesting, and I do associate it with Witt's insights.

We must be very judicious regarding what sort of belief we attribute to that cat. — creativesoul

I agree.

The sound of the plastic is meaningful to her as a result of her connecting it to getting treats. When she hears the plastic, she expects treats. She thinks about the sound and it is significant to her as a result of a pattern of past events. — creativesoul

OK, but how does 'expect' and 'think' add to what is already happening? Don't get me wrong. It's plausible and intuitive. But how is it explanatory? Maybe it is in some way, but this detour to hidden consciousness is curious. Or if expectation is not consciousness, how is it not just the pattern in the cat's behavior? If I open a can of tuna downstairs, my cat will probably come down. Half the time she does. Then we are tempted to add hypothetical entities..

That's a prerequisite for an acceptable notion of belief amenable to evolutionary progression. — creativesoul

Right. I think we both want that. I see human cognition as animal, however complex. I've been watching some great nature documentaries, complex mating dances by birds of paradise, dolphin hunting strategies, etc. Can we see ourselves that way?

What does they refer to? — creativesoul

The creature you mentioned.

For the most part, the marks are arbitrary maybe. Some are not. A sign is always meaningful. Clouds are signs of rain when, and only when, a creature connects them. — creativesoul

So the issue for me is: how is this connection manifested? I think (?) you'll agree that they act differently. — path

I'm trying to avoid mentalistic language, basically. A sign is related or correlated to a response. Can we explore this without peering inside the 'mind' of the creature? And can we do this when talking about humans, also?

Seeing the clouds may influence subsequent behaviour. The notion of probability does not play a role in all belief. I agree though, humans often do something specific after seeing rain clouds. What does that have to do with basic rudimentary non linguistic belief? — creativesoul

Let's imagine some species that sometimes responds to a sign, maybe half of the time. Some other sign (which we would then not call a sign) never elicits a response. Other signs always elicit a response. At least from our perspective it's tempting to talk of probability as a measure of their response.

Bedrock belief is not always linguistic. The connection between the clouds and rain could be bedrock to all subsequent behaviours influenced by that belief. That includes language less creatures too!

That's a prerequisite for an acceptable notion of belief amenable to evolutionary progression. — creativesoul

I agree. I'm trying to come from a place where talking is just one more form of behavior that can be noted. I'm happy to explore belief in terms of response to signs/stimuli.

We can then think of bedrock beliefs as dominant tendencies to respond in this or that way, confidently, the way humans step out of bed, not 'expecting' to fall through. I mean we don't dip our toe in the carpet to check its stability. We just roll out of bed. This stability of the floor is a kind of bedrock for what we 'expect' if something rolls off the bed. Non-mentalistically speaking we might bother to reach down and get it before seeing it. We 'know' that it is down there somewhere.

As far as I know, only humans ask such questions. — Wayfarer

Ah, but if a computer did ask such a question, I suspect that somehow it wouldn't count. I could easily write a program to do so.

Here's one in Python:

print("What does it mean to be an agent ?")

Another way of framing it, is to ask if computer systems are beings. I claim not, but then this is where the problem lies. To me it seems self-evident they're not, but apparently others say differently. — Wayfarer

It was self-evident to many that the world was flat, that some were born to be slaves, etc. To me strong philosophy is what shakes the self-evident and opens up the world some.

I realize that what I'm suggesting is counter-intuitive. It's not about puffing up A.I. and saying that A.I. might have 'consciousness.' Instead it's about emphasizing that we human beings don't have a clear grasp on what we mean by 'consciousness.' Connected to what I'm suggesting is the understanding of meaning as a social phenomenon. To frame it imperfectly in an aphorism: the so-called inside is outside.

I curious if you think ants are beings? How about viruses? How about a person in a coma? Where do you draw the line and why?

The AI needs more than "just" a body; it needs to relate to the world in a particular way. To actually manage to pick up chips and dip, you need it to be able to plan and attain goals (after all, that's what picking up chips and dip is... a goal; and to attain that goal you have to plan... "there are chips and dip on this aisle, so I need to wander over there and look"). Then you need the actual looking; need to be able to grab them, and so on and so on. This entire thing being triggered from a request to pick up chips and dip is a demonstration of the ability to relate the symbols to something meant by them. — InPitzotl

I agree that the task is complex. But note that you are pasting on lots of mentalistic talk. If the android picks up the chips as requested, we'd say that it related to the symbols correctly. Think of how humans learn language. We never peer into someone's pure mindspace and check that their red is our red. All we do is agree that fire engines are red. Our actions are synchronized. You can think of our noises and marks as pieces in a larger context of social conventions. Talk of 'I' and 'meaning' is part of that. I'm not saying that meaning-talk is wrong or false. I'm saying that it often functions as a pseudo-explanation. It adds nothing to the fact of synchronized behavior.

First, the symbols "chips and dip" have to actually be related to what the symbols "chips and dip" mean in order to say that they are understood. And what do those symbols refer to? Not the symbols themselves, but actual chips and dip. So somehow you need to get the symbols to relate to actual chips and dip. — InPitzotl

That's one of the assumptions that I am questioning. The mentalistic language is familiar to us. We imagine that understanding is something that happens in a mind, and colloquially it is of course. Yet we vaguely imagine that this mind is radically private (maybe my green is your red and the reverse.) Roughly speaking we all pass one another's Turing tests by acting correctly, making the right noises.
How do you know that my posts aren't generated by AI? Do you assume that there is just one of you in there in your skull? Why can't two agents share a body? Because we weren't brought up that way. One doesn't have two souls. We are trained into English like animals.

But I think part of what we take for granted when we think of computer programs having thoughts is the simple fact that we're agents. (Yes, and we have hormones and brains and stuff... but the agent part in itself seems very important to me). — InPitzotl

Indeed, it's almost a religious idea. What does it mean to be an agent? It's important to me also, to all of us. The idea that we as humans are radically different from nature in some sense is something like 'the' religious idea that persists even in otherwise secular culture. So we treat pigs the way we do. (I'm not an activist on such matters, but perhaps you see my point.)

If I were to ask my s.o. to pick up chips and dip while at the store, my s.o. would be capable of not just giving me the right English word phrases in response, but also coming home with chips and dip as a response. It's as if my s.o. knows what it means to pick up chips and dip. How is a nominal-only program going to bring home chips and dip, regardless of how well it does passing Turing Tests? — InPitzotl

I don't think this is focused on the real issue. If AI has a body, then it could learn to react to 'get some chips' by getting some chips. People are already voice-commanding their tech.

To me the real issue is somehow figuring out what 'consciousness' is supposed to be beyond passing the Turing test. Let's imagine an android detective who can outperform its human counterparts. Or an AI therapist who outperforms human therapists. If we gave them humanoid and convincing skins, people would probably project 'autonomy' and 'consciousness' on them. Laws might get passed to protect them. They might get the right to vote. At that point our common-sense intuitions embodied in everyday language will presumably have changed.
Our language and the situation will change together, influencing one another (not truly differentiated in the first place.)

So you've said a fair bit about autonomy, but what about that "just nominal" part? — InPitzotl

But have we ever seen a human being with more than just nominal autonomy? — path

Note that I asked a question, that point of which was to say that ....hey, maybe we are taking our own autonomy for granted. Maybe we have familiar loose talk about consciousness and free will and autonomy, and that we are so worried about AI mysticism that we ignore our mysticism about ourselves.

'This AI sure is getting impressive in terms of what it can do, but it's still just stupid computation.'

But this also means that just-stupid-computation is getting more human-like. In short, we still start from some belief in a soul, even if we are secular and think this soul is born and dies. If a computer can learn to say that it has a soul (consciousness) and not be telling the truth, then maybe we've done the same thing. Or at least we're being lazy about what we're taking for granted.

by Jeffrey Searle. — Hallucinogen

Actually it's John Searle.

I demonstrated years ago with the so-called Chinese Room Argument that the implementation of the computer program is not by itself sufficient for consciousness or intentionality (Searle 1980). Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else. To put this point slightly more technically, the notion “same implemented program” defines an equivalence class that is specified independently of any specific physical realization. But such a specification necessarily leaves out the biologically specific powers of the brain to cause cognitive processes. A system, me, for example, would not acquire an understanding of Chinese just by going through the steps of a computer program that simulated the behavior of a Chinese speaker (p.17). — Searle

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

'Mental or semantic' contents are problematic. They are more or less 'conceived' as radically private and unverifiable. It's anything but clear what the implementation of the program is supposed to lack. Searle only passes the Turing test because he spits out signs in a certain way. Why is he so sure that he is swimming in something semantic? An appeal to intuition? 'I promise you, I can see redness!'

Well a program could say that too. I think Searle was a bot. (I know I use 'I think' in the usual way. Obviously ordinary language is full of mentalistic talk. The question is whether we might want to question common sense a little bit, as philosophy has been known to do.) (And I'm not saying my criticisms or ideas are mine or new. I just have to work through them myself, and it's nice to do so in dialogue.)

Have you ever seen a human with only nominal autonomy? — InPitzotl

What I'm getting at is that autonomy is a vague notion, an ideal. We have certain ways of treating one another, and we have a lingo of autonomy, responsibility, etc. So in a loose sense we all have 'autonomy' in that we'll be rewarded or punished for this or that. The issue is whether there is really some quasi-mystical entity involved. Another view is that 'autonomy' is a sign we trade back and forth without ever knowing exactly what we mean. Using the word is one more part of our highly complex social conventions.

But we could also network some AI and see what complex conventions they develop. They might develop some word functionally analogous to 'I' or 'autonomy.'

Do birds have autonomy? Do pigs have a soul? How about ants?

'I think therefore I am' can catch on without anyone really understanding exactly what they mean. Their use merely has to fit in certain conventions and we don't lock them up and might even shake their hand.