Ok. Granted. What does it have to do with bedrock belief? — creativesoul

If you don't mind, perhaps you could look at some of the conversation you missed. It would be easier to respond to this or that link in the chain. I guess the big idea is that bedrock beliefs are enacted and social, including speech acts. Isaac and I talked about the necessary fuzziness of meaning (my suggestion) and the non-existence of meaning (his suggestion) but seem to mean pretty much the same thing.

Our talk of 'meaning' is one more piece of habitual behavior, a pattern absorbed from the community. The prejudice is that we have some kind of direct access to meaning-stuff. Something like this is what AI is never supposed to have. Qualia are beetles in the box, one might say. But the box metaphor itself is subverted by the tale of the beetle in the box. The more AI can perform as we do, the more we can see that we too are more like statistics than we might want to be. (Remember our theoretical synthetic conversation partner? That's where all this came from.)

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Is that an official academic criterion/standard/definition from an otherwise reputable institution of knowledge? — creativesoul

Yes, it's standard stuff. I went ahead and found a quote from a math textbook for you:

Definition 2.1 (Statistic). A statistic is any function, possibly vector valued, of the data. — link

https://people.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.pdf

Of course you are wise to ask. Anonymous forums aren't necessarily a great source on technical matters. I just threw my comment in to ground the metaphor that maybe we as individuals 'are statistics' piggybacking just like A.I. on conversation that came before.

throwing Sartor Resartus into the mix for good measure — Pantagruel

Nice. I remember bumping into that in an anthology. Flavor.

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Ramsey. Worth a whole thread. My gut says that neurone don't represent stuff as percentages - amy more than gasses do - but that we can describe what they are doing in terms of percentages - like we do with the temperature of a gas; and further that while beliefs can be put into percentages that's not their "real" nature. — Banno

That seems about right to me. We can find causal relationships, etc., and we should. But I suspect we'll never be exactly satisfied with any definition of what belief 'really' is. I like the idea that we cope with the world through a whole network of actions and concepts, and that this network (a limited metaphor, like all of them) can't be grounded in something truly elemental. The closest thing to a substratum that I can think of is a vague sense of external reality that is all tangled up in participation in a conversational community.

'X' is made of 'Y' is IMV part of a big blob of coping, but I don't want to say that it's all made of coping either. I'd grunt that metaphysics is impossible if that weren't impossible metaphysics.

Well I'd probably be happy enough to drink from the fountain of youth. I'd like to have centuries to learn to do all sorts of things that I won't otherwise have time for. I doubt I'll ever fly an airplane or play the piano or get around to learning this or that foreign language.

Still we have no choice but to make the best of it, which I try to do like anyone.

Seems to me that you are doing it wrong, then. Being embodied means being open to the slings and arrows. That's what it is to be who you are. — Banno

I hear you, but ... We invent airplanes and telephones and insurance. We master our environment, make it predictable. Right now we can talk across oceans via a sort of disembodiment or extension of our bodies.

In what you quoted I was aiming at the extension of ourselves in this way. We get a taste and can quickly imagine a stronger taste. Of course it's tragicomical to resent not being able to fly.

But do you really not want superpowers? At all?

An honest philosopher always dialogues with his rivals, concedes their points and tries to criticise his thesis with the same rigour as those of others. — David Mo

I agree with you. I'd just say that this image of the honest philosopher was not given to us from on high. It is itself one of the results of dialogue, a kind of sediment. It become a part of our somewhat overlapping identities as philosophers.

At the same time, it's somewhat platitudinous. The devil is in the details. I wager that we will never be done figuring out what we mean by 'rational' or 'critical.' Individually we'll probably always have people who think they have it all essentially figured out, which is perhaps the driving fantasy after all. People will wear that mask with more or less irony and playfulness, more or less genuine openness to threatening alternative vocabularies and perspectives. What I dislike about the pejorative use of 'sophistry' is it's one way we might hide ourselves from such perspectives. It's in our interest to keep our network of beliefs and desires sufficiently stable. We all need some rhetoric at times to protect our fragile identity from the gaze of other who won't play by our rules and see us as we see ourselves.

Well, you were basically objecting to Descartes before in the context of his cogito argument. I did a climb down and agreed with you that an "I" is, perhaps, too complex an entity to be inferred merely from thought. In what sense is my "thinker", here merely an entity whose function is thought, inappropriate? — TheMadFool

It's not that there's something wrong with postulating a thinker. If I were to gripe, I might say that concepts are interdependent, that our understanding of thinking is entangled with a general understanding of the world. But the original issue is that radical skepticism is 'impossible' in that it needs to presuppose some thinker who experiences representations. In that sense it's not radical enough. It takes an old-school philosophical set up for granted. I'm suggesting that we can't intelligibly get behind some kind of setup like this. Why is taking a stream of words as a unified 'I' acceptable to our radical skeptic when the external world is not? How are reality and doubt intelligible apart from others?

I don’t mean “rhetorical” in a sense that implies sophistry or opposes dialectic. I just mean it as in caring about the style and presentation and other non-rational aspects of communication, above and beyond just being technically correct in your logic. To quote myself: — Pfhorrest

Right. And I agree with you in many ways. But my issue would be that there's no clean break between form and content. Roughly speaking, I think the philosophy/sophistry distinction is itself a piece of sophistry, at least when taken beyond ordinary loose talk.

I don’t mean to suggest we turn away from “cosmic enigmas”, just that we don’t mistake our own confusion for those profound depths in need of plunging. — Pfhorrest

Fair enough, but this touches the first point. Some of us are invested in a certain image of the intellectual. It's in our interest to interpret issues in one direction or another. Figuring out what is confusion and what is a genuine enigma is the hard part, and it's hard for me to see it as a technical an objective issue. We get something like objectivity within a speech community that has already agreed on standards.

Loosely, 'strong' philosophy is abnormal discourse that makes a normal discourse possible. This might also help you see where I'm coming from.

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge of accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant — as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. To assert the possibility of a post-Kantian culture, one in which there is no all-encompassing discipline which legitimizes or grounds the others, is not necessarily to argue against any particular Kantian doctrine, any more than to glimpse the possibility of a culture in which religion either did not exist, or had no connection with science or politics, was necessarily to argue against Aquinas's claim that God's existence can be proved by natural reason. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of "revolutionary" philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's "revolutionary" science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate. — Rorty

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/rorty/

I agree that most of what we would consider "sedimentation" or paradigm fixing is cultural, but perhaps there are also biological sedimentations that are much deeper layers and impossible or almost impossible to shift. — Janus

I agree that there is a deeper biological sedimentation (genetic code). In general I don't think I'm trying to say anything against scientific common sense.

What does that mean? Is it not your face? If so, how can an image of your face represent a ghost who was never born? Or if it is someone else's face then ditto? Time to show the beetle in your box, I think. — Janus

The 'person' pictured does not exist. The image was generated by a neural network. It's basically a visual statistic, if you like, which is uncannily believable. (It seems that Banno and I agree that 'she' is attractive.) That led us into a conversation about the nature of self-hood.

It's known as perceived entitivity. People act in such a way as to conform to the typical behaviour of the social group to which they wish to belong (not necessarily the one to which they actually do belong by practical entitivity). — Isaac

Nice. That's one of my favorite themes. Connected with that is the notion of an ego-ideal or target self. In Kojeve/Hegel the quest for recognition is central to human being. I speculate that a kind of pre-rational investment in this or that version of the 'hero' or 'target self' quietly drives or controls a rationality that is never 'pure.' I haven't studied philosophy formally, but I've read some of Freud and Jung, and of course William James, since pragmatism is a big philosophical influence.

What did you understand by "thinker" in my last reply to you? — TheMadFool

I may never know. We've been talking about language in Bedrock Beliefs. One of the themes is how automatic it is. If I try to tell you what I understood by 'thinker,' that will be a fresh speech act on my part. And then you can ask me what I meant by some word in that speech act.

This is connected to using words 'under erasure.' Even as we criticize them, they must retain a certain legibility that makes such criticism possible. And it's never about a simple denial that there is a unified consciousness or that there is a thinker. Philosophers can't legislate the ordinary intelligibility of these words. They are radically dependent on their blind skill, and theoretical discourse cannot be self-founded or 'purified' of this 'thrown-ness.' It can and does move against such 'throwness' by articulating and otherwise blindly enacted paradigm that only then becomes optional. As I see it, such an 'escape' is always only partial and near the surface. The thinker (singular) is always mostly the plural 'we' among whom these tokens signify in an enacted, social form of life.

but I'm a psychologist, I think practically everything comes down to social acceptance!
...
I'm trying to look at the sentence "chairs are physical objects" in the same terms as we looked at "meet me by the tree", what is it trying to do. I think the answer to that is that it is trying to get the listener to take the chair as relatively indisputable. — Isaac

Excellent response. I thought you might mean something like that. That makes sense to me. And I agree with you about social acceptance. Even people being willfully obnoxious are IMV performing for at least a virtual community. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to overstate how social we are. The 'we' is prior to the 'I.' Or some version of that. Nietzsche joked that some are born posthumously. I read that in terms of genius outsiders performing for a projected community that they hope to create.

Oh, and on the subject neural underpinnings, you might be interested to know that there's a response in the brain called a p600 effect (not important why), it alerts us to novelty in various processes. It's active when we process sentences of ambiguous meaning. It completely inactive when we don't. I just thought it might be of interest given your conversation with Banno (which was a good read, by the way). We really do, it seems, have whole sentences and responses which are processed almost on autopilot, only being flagged occasionally when something novel turns up. — Isaac

Nice! I haven't looked into brain science yet. But I'm planning to get around to it. I have studied anomaly detection using neural networks with a bottleneck. It's strange but I know more about fake brains than real brains. And I'm glad that Banno and I could provide a good read. I'm finding this one of the better conversations I've had on a forum.

Also, that automatism you mention is definitely central to what drew me to this thread and why I like Wittgenstein (and Dreyfus and Derrida and...).

But anyway I must finally get some sleep. I hope to talk with you more. And you too Banno and C wherever he went.

Our cognition is far greater than the wetware, but extends out to the things around us. My thoughts become clearer as as I write this; the keyboard forms part of my thinking. Watch someone using an abacus. Further, this conversation is part of our cognition.

Moreover, consciousness is consciousness of something. Hence it extends outside our bodies. — Banno

I completely agree, despite what I improvised about the wetware. It's tricky navigating all of these meanings. We have different ways of talking in different contexts, and philosophy tries to do justice to them all at once.

So... philosophy is just iteratively moving in the direction of steepest descent as defined by the negative of the gradient, by taking steps proportional to the negative of the gradient of the function at the current point. Done by humans or software, makes no nevermind. — Banno

I bet humans use a better algorithm, but we can get a few miles out of the analogy. The tricky part might be specifying what our human loss function would be. In some sense we forge our own standards. We are the animal that fantasizes about leaving the limitations of the flesh behind. Our sense of being essentially cultural beings is so strong that we'd kind of like to upload our consciousness into the virtual realm (as in the not-so-great movie Transcendence.)

I sometimes resent being stuck in this meat puppet. I have such big ideas, you see. I shouldn't be trapped in a monkey. I should be bulletproof and able to fly. Or I should be able to see through any camera at will.

G.B. Shaw ended his 'Back To Methuselah' with humans finally becoming those vortices I mentioned. The play starts in the Garden of Eden and jumps far into the future to the end of the body. In between the human lifespan is extended to 300 years and this has a massive political effect. He was ~ 80 years old when he wrote. It's such a great forgotten book that I had to mention it.

But, just to emphasize a potentially fruitful difference, I don't exactly know what to make of physicalism in this context. Do we know what we mean by 'physical'? Or 'mental' for that matter? To be clear, I am 'for' explanatory power, and I like hearing you talk about the brain.

I should add that I'm delighted that someone seems to understand what I'm getting at with necessarily fuzzy (or as you say, absent) meaning. It's a pretty radical point.

The purpose of the sentence is to say get the other person to be at some place I have in mind. If it does that then who cares what 'tree' means? It just has to be close enough to something we're both going to respond to in the same way. — Isaac

We are definitely on the same page here. The beetle in the box doesn't come into play, except as one more speech act that is appropriate in this or that context. So I think we do have something similar in mind.

Well, yes, I agree with you. I don't think they actually know. And Culler uses just that example, by the way.

If this is the case (and I'm very much inclined to agree with you), then would it not be more likely that there is no such thing as what a word means... Rather than that such a thing exists but we don't know what it is? — Isaac

I guess I like that approach equally well. The tricky part is trying to remain intelligible. I find myself tempted to put just about every word in quotes, but that would drive people crazy.

Without knowing exactly what I mean, I'd call myself a holist. There's something fishy indeed about 'individual' meanings. In the last year I looked into Saussure and was quite impressed.
Culler's little book is nice indeed. So much follows from the arbitrariness of the sign.

'In language there are only differences without positive terms.'

If that (your post) were the result, then so what? — Banno

One last thought on this (I have to work in the morning.) If the AI piggybacks on human conversation, that human conversation can be thought of as a distributed solution to a biological problem. Can we have an AI that doesn't piggyback?

If we program a simulated world in which programs fight, mate, die, and reproduce in the context of occasional complexity-increasing mutation, then probably we'd see some complex patterns emerge. I've seen primitive versions of this already on Youtube. I guess this still piggybacks on the human understanding of evolution, but the 2-D world and the patterns were fresh. The prey species would form a circular herd and rotate, which made them harder to eat. Perhaps our embodied cognition is something like this, a pattern in the wetware.

Would I have had the same response? I suspect not. — Banno

LOL. In the past I have experimented with somewhat ugly but soulful male images. There was a different response.

A little tangent to the AI theme: what if humans eventually mostly interact through avatars? If that happens, it won't be about actual physical beauty but instead about taste. Who will choose or construct the most arresting, seductive avatar? Even on the level of text I think there's a similar element of seduction in philosophy. One good metaphor is perhaps better than fifty careful arguments.

hat have long since already been in use prior to becoming a user. — creativesoul

Exactly. I agree. And that's why I joke that we as individuals also cheat to pass the Turing test. We as personalities are metaphorically speaking something like statistics. Recall that a statistic is any function of the data, so the statistic can very much itself be a function. I mention this because obviously we are much more complex than a point estimate like the sample mean. (And just as a disclaimer, I have feelings and am tempted to speak of qualia, and I don't know exactly how that fits in with the rest of the thinking.)

This is a good place for another point that is dear to me. I don't think that humans know exactly what they mean by 'mind' or 'physical' or so many other words. Instead we are just trained with reward and punishment to use such words appropriately enough. Philosophers do what they can to pin these tokens down, but I still don't think philosophers know exactly what they mean, which means I don't know exactly what I mean when I make this claim. It's a strange point. I don't deny it. But it's dear to me, in all of its fogginess.

The world is already meaningful. — creativesoul

Could you elaborate?

Indeed; and although statistical analysis feels like winning Turing's test by cheating...

If that were the result, then so what? Googles's statistical translations are, after all, translations. — Banno

I do see the problem. Gradient descent is a comically simple algorithm, too. But what of my other point, that we as individuals are winning Turing's test by cheating? There's the old idea that philosophy is one long conversation across the centuries. Individual human beings come along to replace the dying, but the conversation continues. The fresh hardware just has to download the culture, host it, maybe tweak it. It's a flame that jumps from melting candle to melting candle. But this flame doesn't have to be a divine spark. It can just be some patterns that interpret 'themselves' as a 'we' with 'consciousness.'

I tempted to understand God as (among other things) a crystallization of our fantasy of not-being-thrown, of perfect autonomy or self-definition.

If this were written by a synthetic conversation partner... Well, that would be astonishing. If ModBot has progresses this far - well, I would be genuinely nonplussed.

But then, perhaps such an eventuality is inevitable. — Banno

Thanks. I too would be genuinely non-plussed. What's weird is that we don't already find our own linguistic skill unsettling. That's what I take from Wittgenstein, though. There's a darkness in how effortlessly we do this talking thing. We know what we mean...until we slow down and try to grasp it tightly.

Anyway, it probably is inevitable, especially if it's statistical. It'll be piggybacking on millions of human conversations. But then so are we as individuals. Our skullware is also piggybacking on all that came before, and that's what I was getting at with selves as vortices of inherited tokens.

Maybe in 4040 we'll have converted one of the moons of Jupiter into a computer that has absorbed all digitized conversation up to the year of 2056. Of course it will include video data, and it's holgraphic avatar will be trained along with everything else for centuries.

We all adopt our first worldview.

We're thrown into the world in this way. — creativesoul

Yeah. And to me that's something that maybe philosophy fantasizes about overcoming. 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' I think of the quest for 'pure' reason, presupposition-less and self-justifying. To me Wittgenstein is anti-philosophical inasmuch as his foundation is not conceptual but enacted and 'thrown.' But then the right kind of 'anti-philosophical' is just philosophy finally done less wrong. Something like that.

That passed.

Who wins? — creativesoul

So the detective passed? I don't see it as a competition. I just think we are having some good conversation. I love these themes.

Oh, I want Path to win. Especially if she is a bot. But you should not take that personally.

It would just be so very cool. — Banno

What's strange is how human I find it to root for the bot. I fucking loved the blue people in Avatar. Do we root for the bot because the glory of the creation rebounds on the creator? It's like the father learning to root for the son, glad that his boy could beat him at chess. (I wish my dad was a little happier about the turning point. I had to conceal my joy.)

I do not claim to have a Turing test. — creativesoul

Just to be clear, I meant that in a friendly way. I was being metaphorical as I referred to your 'don't worry about AI' post. You said I should not worry until a computer can make correlations between self and world. That's what I'm calling your Turing test (your criterion or thresh-hold for when we should worry.)

I really am not at all trying to be rude. I might just have some weird ideas, though not as weird as I'd like them to be (in that I don't think them original but only rephrased from influences.)

I am neither. "Fog" refers to something other than me. As does "a point". — creativesoul

I'm being metaphorical. What I'm trying to get at is the sense of identity. Am I my face, my text streams, the way I act at work, etc. In ordinary language I am all of these things. But it's a baggy or foggy unity. And it becomes clear to me as I keep reading just how unoriginal I can't help being. I re-enact, even as I try to transcend re-enactment (which is itself a re-enactment of romanticism's creative individual.)

Basically I think people are thrown into a form of life and its various possible/intelligible types. If we question that form of life, we are usually enacting a typical form of questioning.

The main idea is that the self is a kind of collage or collision of influences.

The jump to the use of "consciousness" remains a mystery. — creativesoul

But isn't that what the beetle-in-the-box is about? What is consciousness (in most people's minds) if not the meanings of the words we use? And of course the 'actual' toothache.

The basic philosophical 'superstition' or prejudice seems to be a hidden mental realm. We don't think philosophy needs to prove the existence of a soul or its synonyms. That's given, or has been. Instead the game is proving that this 'consciousness' stuff does or does not touch something 'outside' itself. This way of framing the situation is taken for granted. One talks 'nonsense' as one wanders outside it, just for some fun.

The avatar is beautiful, despite not being a real person. — Banno

I love 'her' face too.

This looks like nonsense to me. — creativesoul

Do you never experience yourself as more of a fog than a point? To me our modern lifestyle in which we project digital selves is somewhat alienating. We're in the Panopticon, and it's our task to fashion an acceptable avatar.

..Just what I would expect the software to say... — Banno

Yup. And it's fun and simple like a health insurance bot. I'm seeing cheap version of A.I. in customer service lately. They have a long way to go.

Sorry but there is nothing clear about that use of those names. — creativesoul

My apologies. I didn't mean to wander into my idiolect. What I'm getting at is that the 'divine spark' is something like the beetle-in-the-box. These days we use a technical word like 'consciousness.' But it's still a mysterious something that we are or think of in terms of an ultimate proximity.

Maybe this will help. Imagine a synthetic detective who could outperform human detectives. Does it draw correlations between 'self' and 'world.' Does it pass your Turing test?

Well, I'm convinced. So let's flip Turing's little test: Can you prove you are not a synthetic conversation partner? :wink: — Banno

Oh, I like that. Now that's a good move.

You two are now playing a game that I am ill-equipped to play...

But it is just a game...

:wink: — creativesoul

Perhaps. There is a spirit of play at work. But I'm not unserious. In case it's not clear, I have the usual intuitive of sense of 'being conscious.' I experience the famous burden of apparent choice that one might call free will. But theoretically and to some degree emotionally I experience a certain distance from these tokens, when I'm not just immersed in the usual ways of using them in ordinary life.

And philosophy forums are so repetitious. I probably take less than a month to cycle through all my arguments. Taking a forum such as this as the statistical base, combined with Wolfram Alpha... might be quite convincing... — Banno

Fucking exactly ! And I also repeat, repeat, repeat. Iteration with a touch of variation. The continuity of the voice (that we can recognize this or that fellow pontificater) is already a kind of informal evidence against the 'divine spark' and its 'free will.' We are already something like vortices of inherited tokens.