...you’ve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether “I am conscious of this text” is a truth-baring proposition. — javra

What is your theory of truth?

I would say the cat on the mat is the truth bearer for the proposition, "The cat is on the mat.", and I don't see it as making sense to think that a proposition could be inherently truth bearing.

Since I have it in my c/p buffer:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

Having thought about it more, I guess I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women.

Yes. Analog vs digital collection and processing of information becomes interesting in this respect. Analog collection of information captures an actual "imprint" of the real world. In which sense, there may actually be information captured which is unexpected or unknown. — Pantagruel

:up:

This is a good point to bring up.

Analog can preserve a more accurate representation, and per Nyquist's theorem, there are limits to how accurate a digital representation can be, as a function of sample rate. Finite bit depth of samples is another dimension of error in the case of digital.

Neural networks are able to exploit such "hidden" information and extrapolate hidden connections. In fact, that is more or less exactly how they work. By contrast, digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode. — Pantagruel

That is somewhat true, but my inner pedant insists that I point out some inaccuracies.

It may be the case that there is a degree of fidelity maintained, due to the somewhat more analog properties of neurons. However, spikes in action potential are a significant feature of our neurons. So there is an element of sampling, playing a significant role in the way our neural nets work.

Rather than an analog vs digital issue, it's more a matter of how is the hardware arranged, and what sort of information processing is the hardware well suited for. Neural networks, natural or artificial, are very good at pattern recognition. Much of the 'hidden information' results in recognized patterns which happen preconsciously.

Also, it's not exactly the case that "digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode". There is a trivial sense in which that is true, in that digital hardware is designed to encode bit states and can only encode bit states. However, it is very much the case that digitally instantiated artificial neural networks, after training on whatever inputs were provided to the ANN, will have a great many bit states which were not determined by the designer. This article touches on aspects of this sort of information processing, that people who care about humanity's future might want to be aware of.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. — plaque flag

Amen brother Flag!

I don't think reason counts much in the god debates. You either buy the idea or you don't. — Tom Storm

Most of my relevant experience in recent years has been with discussions at William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith Forum. So not a remotely unbiased sample. Still, there certainly are Christians who are very good reasoners and knowledgeable.

I think the intuitions individuals have, and the willingness those individuals have, to question intuitions, plays a big role. The premises of arguments for God depend greatly on intuitions, and intuitions (key to making the arguments seem like sound arguments) tend to get reinforced on Sunday mornings.

Any other guys feel that way? — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting question. I think I will be thinking about it for awhile.

I think in some sense I know what you mean. It seems I have a more clearly delineated picture associated with "good man" (or "good woman") than associated with "good person".

I see courage as strongly associated with my "good man", and I see that I have a lesser expectation of courage associated with "good person" and "good woman".

As someone who has watched a lot of chimp documentaries, it makes some sense that I would have thinking biased in such a way.

As someone who likes to think of himself as a feminist, I likely wouldn't have recognized this in myself had you not asked the question.

That said, I think arguments like Plantinga's, if successful, do more than just show us our epistemic limits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think Plantinga's EAAN does succeed in showing people their epistemic limits except in cases where the person recognizes that the EAAN fails.

If your theory of the world is self-defeating, if there is a contradiction in your justification for having true beliefs, it's worth looking at how you can avoid this problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it depends on what is meant by "how you can avoid this problem".

The EAAN suggests that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties. (The argument utterly overlooks the fact that we are members of a social species, and therefore there is a huge adaptive benefit to homo sapiens being able to communicate with some accuracy. So the argument fails to make a very good case, but still...)

It seems to me there are two major categories of responses to this:

1. Go with epistemic grandiosity, and deny that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and reject evolution and/or naturalism.

2. Go with epistemic humility and accept that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and keep on following where the evidence leads to the best of your abilities.

Now I'm not saying those categories are exhaustive. Certainly they are rather exaggerated charicatures to make a point. However, with those categories in mind I do want to ask, what is the problem to be avoided here?

Nope, that's pretty much it. Intuition is improved by acquiring knowledge. That's all. — Darkneos

Your intuitions about intuition could use some development.

If knowledge is justified true belief, then that is different than intuition. (Or at least the 'justification is of a different sort than what we typically think of as justification for a belief to be considered knowledge.)

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking. — Janus

:up:

By acquiring knowledge — Darkneos

There is more to it than simply acquiring knowledge. Tom Storm and T Clark brought up important points. TS brought up experience and TC brought up attentiveness.

Of course acquring knowledge from reading books is valuable and of course reading can result in development of intuitions in all sorts of ways. However, there are important aspects to developing intuitions which are a function of the means by which knowledge is acquired.

For example, I'm 99% sure TS would agree (though he is free to correct me if I am wrong) that he didn't develop the intuitive recognitions he has (e.g. that someone has a weapon) from reading a book. Instead those intuitions came from years of interactions with, and observations of, people. Attentiveness to body language and other nonverbal signals undoubtedly played an important role.

Similar for TC and his engineering intuitions. Attentive observations of the way things worked in the domain of his career resulted in the development of intuitions related to his area of expertise that are substantially better than just guesses.

First of all, I have to make an apology to wonderer1 for my earlier, flippant dismissal... — Amity

No problem. It was perfectly understandable for you to respond as you did, in light of my newness here on TPF.

I'll try to get around to writing something up relatively soon. However, I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep up with all the discussions here on TPF that I am interested in, and I already feel that I owe a couple of other forum members responses that are likely to take me significant time to formulate.

In any case, I'm not going to present much (if any) of a case for what people should do. That's way above my pay grade. At best I'd hope to present some stuff that might spark some recognition of what you can do with some degree of effectiveness.

:lol:

And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. — Srap Tasmaner

Hasty generalization!!! I want you to do it. :razz:

I'm caught up on the thread now. I don't really want to get into a discussion of the fine tuning argument, because I've spent the past 15 years arguing with (mostly) Christian apologists and I'm pretty bored with discussing it at this point. My thinking is that the appearance of fine tuning to the universe gets us (at best) to recognition that there are things we aren't in an epistemic position to be able to explain.

We can speculate, and there are lots of speculative attempts at explanation, and not much strong reason to choose among speculations or even decide that anyone yet has speculated in a way that is somewhat accurate. I lean towards there being a multiverse (in line with Guth's thinking on eternal inflation) as being relatively parsimonious, but I don't lean that way nearly strongly enough to think it is worth spending any time arguing for it.

One point I would raise in the context of speculating about goddish minds as an explanation is, "What reason do we have to think that it is metaphysically possible for a mind to exist without supervening on some sort of information processing substrate?"

I did want to comment more on the following though:

When taken together with Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-defeating (or Hoffman's more fleshed out, but similar argument against mind-independent reality) I find this line of reasoning compelling. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Plantinga has a brilliant mind, but his brilliance is very limited by his nescience with respect to 'the' scientific picture and naturalistic perspectives. Unfortunately Plantinga is only able to present straw men to attack with the EAAN. Admittedly the EAAN can be highly effective as an apologetic that maintains others in a state of nescience similar to that of Plantinga.

I'm not interested in picking up the burden of presenting a standalone counterargument to the EAAN, because I'm not cognitively well suited to doing things that way. However if you, or anyone else wants to start a new thread discussing the EAAN specifically I'd be happy to jump in and point out flaws in the EAAN. Furthermore, I do see consideration of the EAAN to be valuable, in that engaging in consideration of it can lead to a well warranted humility with regards to the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

I'm much less familiar with Hoffman's argument, having only briefly looked into it today, but my initial impression is that it looks self defeating to me. Something along the lines of, "Our knowledge of how things work in reality proves that we know nothing about how things work in reality." Again, it seems like there is thinking there that is well worth considering in the interest of developing a nuanced understanding of the reliability and lack thereof of our cognitive faculties. However, I think it is important to avoid black and white thinking about the issue(s) and develop a nuanced understanding of our cognitive faculties.

Science assumes the world is rational because it must. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not really. Scientists observe regularities and develop strong intuitions as to the reliability of the observed regularities. It is not a matter of having made a choice to assume the 'rationality' of the world. For scientists it is a matter of having an undeniable intuitive understanding of the 'rationality' of the world.

It would be more accurate to say, "Scientists have a working hypothesis that the world is 'rational' because doing so has reliably allowed for much better than chance accuracy of predictions."

You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom. — frank

:up:

They don't have to focus on the human element because you are the human element and if everything goes right, you'll be thrilled to head to campus or to the lab or to the site everyday because you get to do science all day! — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

The software runs on the crowd, enough of us always alive to not lose our progress in the game's attempt to understand itself. — plaque flag

I like it.

It feels like a pragmatist take on language ought to fit better with science-engendering prejudices (or metaphysical assumptions) than with science-blocking ones, but it's beyond me at the moment. — Srap Tasmaner

This seems insightful to me, although I've never been very interested in philosophy of language, and I don't know much about it, beyond the idiosyncratic philosophy of language I've developed on my own.

In science, and at least some engineering, there is a need to be able to zoom your perspective in and out, and switch between different conceptual frameworks (and associated vocabulary) fairly fluidly. It seems to me that efficiency of conveying ideas often trumps the accuracy of statements, in face to face examples of such conversations. There is a trust that the person you are discussing things with can connect the dots, or let you know where you have been insufficiently clear.

So it seems to me, that at least in cases of collaborative or interdisciplinary, science and engineering, there is social reinforcement for speaking in a pragmatic way, and it is a matter of sinking or swimming in many such environments to develop techniques for, and facility with, treating language very pragmatically.

Another factor is a tacit recognition that some things aren't going to be effectively communicated linguistically, and some sort of visualization technique needs to be used. I doubt many scientists or engineers would put it this way, but I'd say that it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the most effective only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties.

I'm trained in math, and group theory... — plaque flag

I've got some talent for math, but never developed a love of mathematics for its own sake. I remember one day, during my first semester of college calculus, the TA telling us that the homework assignment for that day was all story problems. The whole class seemed to groan, whereas my reaction was, "Thank goodness." I enjoy math much more when I can see how to apply it to solving problems I can visualize.

I prefer the notion of horizon or background to that of things-in-themselves, but it's not that important in this context. The idea is that we can zoom in on reality, that we have a sense of greater detail waiting for us in every direction, if making the effort becomes worthwhile. The lifeworld (the encompassing world in which and for which we make models) has 'depth' but (for me) no ultimate Reality 'behind' it. — plaque flag

I like the notion of horizon in this context, but I don't know how to interpret that last sentence. I'd be inclined to say that the lifeworld is an aspect of reality, or at least the part of reality we have some epistemic access to. I don't know what it would mean to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld.

I think sure, we might be in a simulation or multiverse, so the simulation or universe exists in some context we don't have epistemic access to. However, I would still see the simulation or universe as being an aspect of reality.

Undoubtedly part of the context of that for me, is seeing people as varying in the extent that they are in touch with different aspects of the way things are in reality. So maybe you and I are too different in the way we think of "reality", for me to form a clear understanding of what you mean.

This has become a common guiding light when tackling the domain of the unknown in the sciences and is the reason that there is consternation over the "Fine-Tuning Problem," the problem that, in several respects, the universe is ‘fine-tuned' for life". — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've only read this far and need to step out, so will look at the rest later. I just want to point out that we might equally say that the universe seems tuned to cause the death of any life that evolves. 99.99% of the places we might imagine being teleported to in this universe would result in a quick death. It looks to me as if life in the universe is a fluke, despite the fact that we happen to be in a location where we notice life all around us.

There's also the issue of metaphor itself. What exactly is a metaphor ? If human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, it's an important question. Roughly I relate it to analogy. I sometimes try to open my front door (where I live) by pushing a button on my car keys. The mind exploits skill in one domain in a new domain. Something like that. — plaque flag

:up:

Insightful.

"Analogy" in this context is also a metaphor, but a valuable one. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest that metaphors are simplistic but epistemically pragmatic abstractions (EPAs) we use in lieu of knowledge of things in themselves which is beyond the capacity of our brains to acquire.

I personally frequently think of metaphors as things we use in considering emergent properties that supervene on reality in ways more complicated than we can grasp. As an electrical engineer I see transistors as such EPA metaphors. While I know that the physics subvenient to the behavior of a particular transistor could in principle be investigated in order to have a more complete and complex understanding of the thing in itself, I don't have a pragmatic need for such understanding and can leave it to other engineers and scientists to be cognizant of such things. In turn, I can design things which use transistors and then provide a computer programmer with a higher level metaphor which the programmer uses in determining how to have a microprocessor interact with what I designed. The higher level metaphor I provide to a programmer is another EPA with no need to discuss the subvenient transistors for the programmer's pragmatic purposes.

Of course what I've presented here is a rather narrow perspective on metaphors, but perhaps others may find it useful to their thinking.

I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened. — Srap Tasmaner

:100: :up:

Edit: The ARHGAP11b mutation looks like it might have been a key happy accident that resulted in our brains evolving so much 'overkill'.

But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve.

Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able? — Srap Tasmaner

I'd say that depends on who we include in "we". Certainly there are people with much less ability to participate in language than we tend to expect of people.

That said, as a species we have evolved to have a dependency on (and ability to benefit from) language to share our learnings with each other, in order to be adaptive. Our linguistic faculties are different from the intuitive faculties we share with other animals, with our linguistic faculties resting 'atop' our intuitive faculties but also playing an ongoing role in reshaping what our intuitions reveal.

I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. (For those of us with relatively functional linguistic faculties, anyway.)

Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things. — plaque flag

:up:

Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. There is a huge amount which can be learned about ourselves, from observing infants and young children learning. When we are very young all of our learning is a matter of automated deep learning in our brains, resulting from our interactions with the the world. The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world.

:up:

So asserting the Kuhnian proposition that empirical knowledge has a paradigmatic structure which makes Popperian progress incoherent is just a kind of temper tantrum designed to lay waste to every position? — Joshs

I don't see temper tantrums as particularly relevant. However, I do see what I infer to be your interpretation of Kuhn's and Popper's thinking to be a bit simplistic. Popper recognized the importance of falsification to recognizing faults in one's naive hypotheses/intuitions. Kuhn recognized the importance of new paradigms arising in the aftermath of naive hypotheses/intuitions being falsified.

I gather Stephen Law is more sympathetic to Popperian realism than to Kuhnian relativism, but perhaps one can counter his ‘Going Nuclear’ model with one that posits someone named Stephen who, in getting over their head in a philosophical discussion, decides to impugn the motives of their interlocutor rather than attempt to revise their own construction — Joshs

I don't know enough about Law's thinking to speculate on his interpretations of Popper and Kuhn, and I don't think it is particularly relevant. I do think there is value in recognizing the use of rhetorical tactics pointed out by Law, regardless of speculation as to what is motivating the use of such rhetorical tactics.

Given that the link I provided was an excerpted chapter from Law's book Believing Bullshit, I think Stephen's concern might have more to do with people believing and defending bullshit, than with analyzing people's motivations for believing and defending bullshit in any sort of comprehensive way. It can be way too easy to jump to wrong conclusions about people's motivations.

This is more mythic than scientific lol. But what about this scene with Luke and Obi-Wan?
Luck? Chance? Unconscious? Animal instinct? Intuition? Or… ? :sparkle: — 0 thru 9

It. conveys a difference between having well trained intuitions and not having well trained intuitions although it frames it in magical terms of using the force.

That said, I've learned some Jedi mind tricks over the years. :wink:

I suspect we are thinking of intuition differently. — Tom Storm

Interesting. I see you and as both talking about intuition as it has developed for each of you. Could you elaborate on what key differences might be?

There's no way to improve your intuitions apart from learning about something, and even then it's not a guarantee. — Darkneos

Right, learning is required and the consequences of that learning are not fully predictable. However, I'm not talking in black and white terms, of intuitions either being perfectly accurate or totally unreliable. I'm just suggesting that intuitions can be improved to a significant degree.

And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from? — Joshs

That's a long twisty story that might be said to have begun with my being born a few months after JFK's moon speech. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an answer, or whether you really are looking for an answer.

So while I'm waiting for an explanation as to what you might consider a reasonable answer, I have another question for you. Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear?

Suppose Mike is involved in a debate about the truth of his own particular New Age belief system. Things are not going well for him. Mike’s arguments are being picked apart, and, worse still, his opponents have come up with several devastating objections that he can’t deal with. How might Mike get himself out of this bind?

One possibility is to adopt the strategy I call Going Nuclear. Going Nuclear is an attempt to unleash an argument that lays waste to every position, bringing them all down to the same level of “reasonableness”. Mike might try to force a draw by detonating a philosophical argument that achieves what during the Cold War was called “mutually assured destruction”, in which both sides in the conflict are annihilated.

IOW, doubting and logically evaluating intuitions can lead to having very reliable intuitions in the future. There is a synergy that can arise from the interaction of slow thinking and fast thinking.
— wonderer1

Not exactly no, intuition is more just playing off what you already know hence why it’s reliable with an expert. Logically evaluating them won’t take you anywhere. — Darkneos

Do you speak from experience? Have you tried improving your intuitions, and always failed?

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. — apokrisis

You think highway hypnosis is something unique about you?

Have you arrived home after a drive and not remembered the details of the drive? Almost everyone who drives has had this common experience, a phenomenon that has come to be called highway hypnosis...

However research finds that if someone is an experience in a field then their intuition about something regarding that field is reliable. — Darkneos

This gets at something I found highly questionable about the way you originally described the research results. Intuitions within certain domains can have very good reliability, when the neural nets underlying those intuitions have had a high degree of training on the way things in those domains work in reality.

Someone who understands the way development of reliable intuitions works, can then make relatively accurate judgements about the reliability of his own intuitions in relation to whatever the present situation happens to be. Furthermore, the reliability of one's intuitions can sometimes be tested to increase or decrease the confidence one has in the reliability of one's intuitions before deciding whether to commit to going with intuitions. Over time one can develop good intuitions about the reliability of one's intuitions.

IOW, doubting and logically evaluating intuitions can lead to having very reliable intuitions in the future. There is a synergy that can arise from the interaction of slow thinking and fast thinking.

:up:

As for its accuracy, tests show intuition seems to right about 50% of the time, so you’d have better odds through guessing — Darkneos

Can you provide a link to the testing you are referring to?

...aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible — Joshs

Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture.

Your simultaneous red and green scenario demonstrates how easily intuitons can be misleading.

Suppose you have a white piece of paper in a totally dark room. You have the ability to shine a monochromatic red light on the paper, or a monochromatic green light on the paper, or both lights on the paper simultaneously. What do you see in these three different cases of illuminating the paper?

You can play around with a fairly analogous situation at https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html, where you can choose a color to be displayed in terms of levels of red, green, and blue by selecting integers between 0 and 255 specifying the intensity of your display's emissions of each RGB element. For example, when I put in 255 for red and green and 0 for blue I see a bright yellow. Assuming your color vision is normal I expect you will see bright yellow as well.

The situation is a bit different when we are talking about the color of an object when illuminated by white light. In the situations discussed above we are talking about emission spectrums. When we talk of the color of an object we are talking about absorption spectrums. The absorption spectrum of an object is an indication of what wavelengths of light are absorbed by the object and what wavelengths are reflected by the object. However, the principles involved are related. We might have a chemist design a pigment or combination of pigments such that when white light shines on the pigmented object only a narrow band of red wavelengths and a narrow band of green wavelengths is reflected into our eyes, and no yellow wavelength light is reflected into our eyes. I expect we would see the object as yellow, even though it is reflecting red and green at the same time.

Now about intuition... I've been talking a lot about it recently. I think intuitions are a matter of deep learning in the neural networks constituting our brains, and the reliability of our intuitions is situational and a function of what the training inputs to those neural nets has been in the past.

However, I don't know if you are really interested in a naturalistic understanding of intuition, so I'll leave it there for now.

Edit: IIRC the pigment example may yield the experience of seeing brown. (which in a sense is a 'dim yellow')

Edit 2: If you use the website I linked and enter R=120, G=120, and B=0 I predict you will see a brown square.

Yes, this is another good point. Since we all have somewhat different subjective experiences of "the present", this is a very good reason why there cannot be an objective, and to use Luke's word, "distinct", separation between present, past, and future. There are no objective points of distinction within time, those distinctions are subjective and somewhat arbitrary — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm curious about your theory, as to how it is we are communicating with each other. However, I can tell you, that you can't understand much about the answer without a more accurate theory of time than you currently have. I suspect you haven't subjected your theory of time to the many falsifying tests which could be done. Thus you haven't seen the need for a more accurate paradigm.

Think about what you said earlier:

But if the present consists of a duration of time, then some of that duration must be before, the other part which is after. So if the present separates future from past, and it consists of a duration of time, then part of the present must be in the future, and part of it in the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are correct that we can't think thoughts without a period of time elapsing but look at the inability to clearly distinguish between past and future that comes with your perspective. Do you think it is your thought processes which determine what is past and what is future?