People are sure that they know what 'tree' means — path
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
Well, I've won the CIS hetro male section.Who will choose or construct the most arresting, seductive avatar? — path
Do we know what we mean by 'physical'? Or 'mental' for that matter? — path
Perhaps our embodied cognition is something like this, a pattern in the wetware. — path
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
*If anyone is curious, that face beside path is the face of a ghost who was never born. — 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. — Janus
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. — path
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
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
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. — Banno
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
Recall that a statistic is any function of the data, — path
Is that an official academic criterion/standard/definition from an otherwise reputable institution of knowledge? — creativesoul
https://people.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.pdfDefinition 2.1 (Statistic). A statistic is any function, possibly vector valued, of the data. — link
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? — 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.) — path
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