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?

But I can pick out lions, and other things. How do I do this? — NotAristotle

Because you have trained neural networks. (Although it seems likely that we have some innate programming to recognize animals as being animals in general.)

See this video to get a sense of how it works.

Is it not possible to perceive, except in an object-oriented way? — NotAristotle

I would say it is not possible for humans to perceive visually, except in an object-oriented way. A couple of points.

1. Our visual perception is neural network based, and our brain does what amounts to fast data compression so that what reaches consciousness is a gestalt of an object, with knowledge of fine details requiring conscious attention.

2. Our ancestors needed very fast recognition of lions as being lions, without spending excessive time consciously assessing what it is they were looking at.

I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity. — Janus

When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.

Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer.

Different areas of scientific investigation do have to be handled differently depending on what is being investigated, but I think this has been well understood for quite awhile now, and I doubt Galileo did much to impede scientists' understanding of this. However, I'm not a science historian, so maybe Galileo did retard humanity's development of science in some regard despite the intuitive implausibility of that to me.

In any case, I still think attributing such a large causal role (in the development of neuroscience) to Galileo, sounds kind of ridiculous in light of the other factors i brought up, having to do with the difficulty of neuroscience.

It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved. — Janus

I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.

Frankly, it’s all a little weird for me to suspect that following one’s own conscience has the effect of encouraging and discouraging others, as if we’re training animals. It sounds to me more of an admission of guilt than a statement of fact. — NOS4A2

We are training animals. Evolution resulted in us having instinctive reactions to things, which result in us training each other.

Do you think it would make sense to distinguish between the nature of our subjective experiences of 'the present' and the nature of time in the larger reality we are a part of?
— wonderer1

I don't think that this would be possible at this point. The only thing we have to go on is our subjective experiences. So I think it's necessary to get a good understanding of our subjective experiences of time before we can proceed toward speculating about the nature of time in a larger reality. This is because our subjective experiences of time have a very significant impact on our speculations concerning any larger reality... — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, we have different subjective experiences, and based on my subjective experiences it is not only possible, but extremely valuable to recognize difference in our subjective experiences of a present, and happenings in time in the world.

One of my subjective experiences involves watching basketball games and recognizing that I'm not processing visual data at the rate that neurotypical people do, and therefore miss details of the action that other people catch. But even neurotypical people don't have visual processing speeds all that much faster than mine, and that is why slow motion replay is common with televised sporting events, to allow people to catch details of action which they would otherwise miss.

Along similar lines, scientists, studying how baby birds learn to sing an attractive song, realized that because birds have higher flicker-fusion (visual processing) rate than humans, the scientists might need slow motion video of birds to find out what is going on. I posted a link in the shoutbox recently, but if you are interested I can look it up again.

Another factor in my subjective experience is looking at signals captured by oscilloscopes that represent things at time resolutions down to around a nanosecond. I have very good reasons for thinking events really are happening on extremely small time scales regardless of the fact that my unaided perceptions don't reveal things on such small time scales.

Might it be the case that there is a relevant lack of diversity to the sort of subjective experiences you have had?

Ahem. Sign on the door says “philosophy forum’. — Wayfarer

Does it need to be changed to say "philosophy silo"?

:up:

It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. — Joshs

Not at all. Of course our cognition can be affected by emotions in a great many ways. The brain has a quite interconnected structure. Certainly my desire to understand the weirdness of my brain played a huge role in me studying relevant science, resulting in me being quite confident that I have a more up to date perspective on the subject than you do.

Do you think there is any significance to whether a person has looked into the relevant science or not?

This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth. — Joshs

Do you think your emotions determine what is true?

The most common explanations make reference to "what Turing Machines do," because that's the easiest way to describe computation, but then Turing Machines are themselves an attempt to define what human beings do when carrying out instructions to compute things. But then human consciousness is also explained in terms of computation, making the whole explanation somewhat circular. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you have a citation supporting "Turing Machines are themselves an attempt to define what human beings do"?

I've been under the impression that Turing conceived of the TM as a sort of minimalist CPU, and I wonder whether Turing himself would have thought of TMs as more than a conceptual tool for use in thinking about what human beings do, rather than an attempt at defining what human being's do.

Anyway, I think computationalism has a large element of looking for the keys under the street lamp because that's where the light is. Computation is a human invention that is as it is, because it is relatively easy for us to think in such terms.

Connectionism is much closer to where it's at when considering the way human thought really works. Perhaps it is harder for most people to think in connectionist terms though.

Points in time are not consistent with our conscious experience of duration. As I said, the duration of the present is indefinite. I said the present consist of "duration", not "a duration", and if I sometimes mentioned "a duration", I meant an indefinite duration. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you think it would make sense to distinguish between the nature of our subjective experiences of 'the present' and the nature of time in the larger reality we are a part of?

It seems to me that you and Luke are both right in ways, but this discussion seems a muddled mess due to not making such a distinction.

I thought suggesting Galileo is to blame for the state of neuroscience was a bit bizarre.

“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.”

In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it.

Human brains are enormously complex, the technological challenges of gathering sufficient data to learn much are huge, and the ethical restrictions on how science can make progress in the field mean we should expect progress to be relatively slow. (Not saying I disapprove of the ethical restrictions.)

Galileo is hardly to blame for any of this.

The secrets of existence - the answer to “why anything?” - is to be found in the immanence of semiosis... — apokrisis

Don't you think that might be a tad bit grandiose?