People are sure that they know what 'tree' means — path

Hardly. I don't know how much experience you have with your native flora, but pick some medium-large sized woody plant and ask people if it's a tree or a shrub.

The point is it doesn't matter. If I say "meet me by that tree" no one's going to get confused if they think we're in a shrubbery. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Who will choose or construct the most arresting, seductive avatar? — path

Well, I've won the CIS hetro male section.

Actually, on consideration, that's not so. My avatar is me made up as an orangutang. The facial flaps of a male would not hold to my face, so the finished result is actually closer to a female 'tang.

Do we know what we mean by 'physical'? Or 'mental' for that matter? — path

Well, in terms of using the term, I think we just want other people to feel compelled to agree with us, but I'm a psychologist, I think practically everything comes down to social acceptance!

The gist of saying something is 'physical' is making it more difficult for the other person to disagree. I'm not saying here that it's nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick, I really do believe that there's a physical world distinct from my mental constructs, but 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.

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.

Perhaps our embodied cognition is something like this, a pattern in the wetware. — path

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even people being willfully obnoxious are IMV performing for at least a virtual community. — path

I read that in terms of genius outsiders performing for a projected community that they hope to create. — path

Yeah, this definitely happens, they are fairly well studied areas in social psychology. 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).

It's an area of great interest to me, the extent to which our beliefs (by my definition) are formed and maintained by social group dynamics.

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.

With sedimentation I was thinking of culture. For instance, this English language is a kind of historical sediment. And then there are the 'assumptions' (enacted interpretative approaches) that philosophers don't know they have and so haven't been able to challenge. Perhaps you've seen how Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' tends to offend and mystify, precisely because it's so well aimed. — path

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.

Speaking of the beetle in the box see this.

*If anyone is curious, that face beside path is the face of a ghost who was never born. — path

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.

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.

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. — path

OK, seems I missed that part of the thread. The idea that it is a computer generated image of a face didn't occur to me.

I know who you are now....9, Hoo, JJames, etc... it took a liitle while, but not long. Perhaps an AI could do a better job of concealing the underlying self behind different online "identities".

What if you are a synthetic conversation partner - would you realise that?

Damn, if I'm just repeating the same stuff every few weeks, then how am I not just a synthetic conversation partner... — Banno

The difference consists in whether or not you care...

This AI stuff is mostly a boring wank...

every belief is a relation between an agent and a proposition, such that the agent holds the proposition to be the case. The general form of a belief is "A holds that P is true"
— Banno

...then the cat has no beliefs. It doesn't believe either of those propositions because it doesn't understand propositions, — Isaac

Yeah, I misspoke. The cat believes it has four feet, not that "I have four feet" is true.

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.

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. — path

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.

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?

I already have superpowers. I can make light at the flick of a switch, and travel at great speed for hours.

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.

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.

[deleted by path]

It seems strange to speak defensively about accusations of "deceit" when no mention of deceit has been made and no other trolls are present in the thread. What seems creepy to me is the need to constantly change online identity. This is far from a common phenomenon on this site as far as I have been able to tell. If one had a good philosophical reason for such identity changes one ought to be able to explain it without taking it personally.

Recall that a statistic is any function of the data, — path

Is that an official academic criterion/standard/definition for what counts as a statistic, of what it takes to be a statistic, from an otherwise reputable institution of knowledge?

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.

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

Yes, it's standard stuff. — path

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

[deleted by path]

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.)

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.) — path

We're supposed to be discussing what counts a bedrock belief.

I am strongly asserting that we form, have, and hold beliefs long before language acquisition begins in earnest. If "bedrock belief" refers to the most rudimentary, simple, and basic beliefs possible to have then your aiming at the wrong target. That said...

Earlier I mentioned that there are some things called "bedrock belief" that are enacted and social, as a result of language use. Many of you have further discussed these things, and wandered off into AI, math, and religious musings/connections/associations/correlations.

So...

The social influence on individual belief is being discussed. Self-image and/or similar notions have been discussed. There can be no doubt about the social interdependent aspect of one's belief system, including but not limited to rudimentary and/or foundational beliefs that arise as a result. We're taught what connections to make with language use(we adopt belief) while amidst the practice thereof. Self identity is one consequence. How one takes account of themselves and the world is just a part of what results in one's own identity. How others take account of us plays a role as well.

We are all too familiar with notions of brainwashing, indoctrination, inculcation, etc. We know these things happen. These things happen with different individuals. Many times these social influences result in a notion of self(self worth, self-identity, etc.) that is unsettling to the individual. These are important things to report upon and focus on, but they do not count as non linguistic belief.

More importantly, I cannot see how anyone here can use the position they're advocating for to coherently account for the most bedrock of all beliefs... the non linguistic and/or pre linguistic variety. We all know that language is not necessary in order for a creature to form, have, and/or hold some belief or other.

On the other hand...

Language use IS how one is 'thrown' into the world. The problem, as I see it, is that discussion has nothing to do with the non linguistic belief that gives rise to the very ability for belief adoption via language acquisition to even happen.

So...

Connect some dots for me...

What does any of that have to do with bedrock belief? Moreover, what does all belief consist of such that that combination results in belief formation? All knowledge is accrued. Thus, we can confidently say that belief is accrued as well. Evolutionary amenability demands it in some way.

There's a gulf between the belief of non linguistic creatures and the belief of language users.

How does what you say here bridge that divide?