A bit more than personal preferences. — Banno

I'm not trying to over-simplify and can't disagree with Nussbaum's wish list of available capabilities, but I still abstract out the fundamental principle sounds something along the lines of advancing Enlightenment rights for the "pursuit of happiness."

So there is something a bit more sophisticated here than "happiness". — Banno

Happiness principles aren't unsophisticated. Given the centrality of the concept to Utilitarianism and the role it plays, 1000s of pages have been written trying to explain what happiness is.

But the quibble seems to be the way we wish to portray the same thing, less so the substance.

If they don't want an implant, I won't make 'em have one. — Banno

That is what I was agreeing with and suggesting your comments implied otherwise. You argued the maximization of happiness wasn't a proper objective but instead said maximizing benefit was the objective. While I suppose we could have talked past each other, I read "maximizing benefit" as something that could be measured by some observable criteria, whereas happiness is determined just by asking the person what makes him happy.

So, if you're saying maximizing benefit simply meaning maximizing personal preferences, then the distinction with that and happiness collapses for all practical purposes.

Anatomy tells the story. Analytic philosophy has never even been in the game. — apokrisis

Absolutely agree. They are different categories. It would be absurd if Wittgenstein weighed in on the neurological underpinnings of thought.

I'd ask you sort that out or we just talk past each other. You cannot offer empirical evidence that defeats Wittgenstein"s claims not because he's some God who can't be wrong, subject to worship and cult leader status, but because he's not making an empirical claim.

Notice the absence here of "tacitly admitting their former state was wanting" ? instead we look towards maximising benefit - but not in terms of happiness so much as of capability. It's not worth that has increased, but capacity - they can do more things — Banno

But how would you justify a cochlear implant in someone feeling full fulfillment within the deaf community, having no desire to leave its comfort? Would you feel justified in insisting upon it even should the person feel overall greater unhappiness for having been pulled into the general world of the hearing?

Measuring "doing more" isn't just in counting new abilities, but in the value the person receives from them. If the person enjoyed that special comraderie of the deaf community, that thing will be lost, and it might have received great weight from him in terms of personal value not gained from hearing.

Consider SRS, for example.

A counterpoint to consider. I met a gentleman who was deaf from birth, now in his middle years. His parent refused to provide any remediation, including contact with other deaf people, in the belief that this would build his ability to adapt to "normal" hearing society and so position him well for a good life. However the result was that although he could not fit in well with the hearing, he also could not fit in with the deaf community, and so found himself isolated.

The attempt by his parents to maximise his opportunity had the exact opposite result. — Banno

I know of a person exactly like this, and it was and remains tragic just due to his social isolation. He did go on to get a cochlear implant, but he still has significant limitations understanding, likely from the limited language skills he obtained prior to receiving it.

The question of the cochlear implant raises is another one as well, which is whether one ought provide a cochlear implant if available. To do so requires a belief that normalization is better than allowing the person remain within the close knit and proud sub-culture the deaf have created. That is, it touches upon your question about whether being normal is the goal. It seems intuitive though to increase one's ability to interact with the world by providing hearing where it was previously lacking. The final rule therefore likely being that one ought do what increases the overall happiness of the individual even if it means tacitly admitting their former state was wanting from the state you are moving them to.

In any event, I draw a rigid distinction between ability and worth, with infinite worth taken as a given, undiminishable and not measurable by ability. That is, to suggest the worth of the deaf person has increased when he has been given the ability to hear is offensive. His worth is not to be measured in terms of the things he can do.

I rather agree with Wittgenstein, that language is a vehicle of thought, not a reflection of thoughts happening elsewhere. — hypericin

This suggests thought is language, words traveling throughout our brain, which is a metaphysical claim, arguing about what the internal thing going on in our head is. That would not be consistent with Wittgenstein, but a better phrasing would be that thinking is shown through use, namely language.

That said, when I think verbally, I don't think in the compressed manner that you suggest — hypericin

This points out the problem with ascribing a metaphysical claim to Wittgenstein because here we're now being baited into a conversation about how different people might think. Witt can't answer that question. He's not a scientist or linguist. He's only saying that whatever the mystery in your head is, it's not something we can speak of, but what we can know about it and talk about is the linguistic expression.

I dont recognize anything you've said. — AmadeusD

I guess we're at an impasse, not understanding what one another are saying. Alas.

. But they are objectively not special in any sense other than a theological one. — AmadeusD

To the extent this suggests some sort of objective basis for the determination of value in the sense there are agreed upon criteria that can be measured in some empirical sense, this strikes me as a category error. Value is not measured that way. If you don't see it as a category error, but you insist no distinction between value based judgments and empirically measurable ones, then it's just question begging, assuming what you've set out to prove, which is there is no difference between value judgments and empirical ones, placing within the premise your conclusion: humans are not special.

I am very much against this binary scheme, and I like the philosophers who have challenged it. Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Adorno. Generally, 20th century scepticism towards reason, and its inclusion of the body, saved philosophy from becoming a complete idiot. — Jamal

And don't forget Rabbi Shneur Zalman's Tanya, Hasidic mysticism, pre-20th Century. The idea that our animalistic side is base or evil is not a universal religious doctrine.

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, who is said to have wept near the time of his death and explained:

"In the World to Come, I will no longer be able to put on tefillin or perform a mitzvah. Only in this world is that possible — and that is why I weep as I prepare to leave it."

Heaven is lesser because you can't carry out good acts without a body. A different perspective.

They are the largest surplus resource we have. They are not special. — AmadeusD

This is the Lounge so I can say whatever I want. Not only are babies each special, but so is every child of God, regardless of age, and you are as well, each of us with a divine soul of infinite worth, regardless of whether you agree or not. We are not born into sin, but perfection.

My view is unapologetically theistic, but it's no different than what a secular humanist would say, minus the holy talk.

I just wonder how other areas of thought might be different if we did. — Patterner

We count to 60 and say we have 1 minute, then we count 60 of those and we say we have an hour. We divide circles in 360 degrees. And of course outside the US, there are 100 degrees between freezing water and boiling water, but not in the US. There are all sorts of ways of doing it, mostly just convention. Maybe it changes our brain structure, but I doubt it. That's why I have no idea what it means for it to be 50 degrees celcius but I do know what 50 degrees Farenheit feels like.

My third thought is another question. Why do we use Base 10? Doesn't it make more sense to go to the next value after you have used up all your fingers? I hold up fingers for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, then my friend holds up one finger for 11. Although I guess I should rewrite that. My tenth finger could be *. Then we would write:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, *, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1*, 20, 21... — Patterner

Typically, you move to letters when your base extends past 10, like in hexadecimal: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,A,B,C,D,E,F,10... The base one uses is dependant upon the purpose, where hex is used in computer applications.

We use 60 for minutes and hours.
12 for clocks

I'm sure there are others.

Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

If night is the period before sunrise, then yes, you can. Look to the East. I'd allow Wittgenstein into the lab, in the hope of helping Pinker get his conceptual foundations in order. — Banno

Well, my analogy means to be forced, meaning if the morning star is defined as that in the morning, it can't exist not in the morning. No need to stare at the sky in the morning hoping to catch a lazy evening star that forgot to go inside. It's not subject to empirical disproof.

When I was a kid, I was hopelessly confused when night was, given that I was told a day was 24 hours. Then I learned night was part of day, but then I didn't have a word for the time the sun was up. How could that be day if it lasted less than 24 hours?

Then this: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." Day starts in the evening?

I define "tolerance" as how much disagreeable activity someone will put up with. It's not a particularly kind gesture to tell someone you'll tolerate them, but it's not as bad as rejecting and not as good as accepting. It's somewhere in between. .

To say I "tolerate" homosexualty, for example, means I'd rather it not be, but I'll endure it.

With that understanding, does the right put up with more behavior it finds objectionable than the left? Maybe, but that might just speak to changes from conservative values to more liberal ones and the right having to accept the existence of what they disagree with.

So then the next question: Is the left more embracing of (not just tolerant of) change than the right? I'd think so, which is why the word "conserve" attaches to the right and "progress" attaches to the left.

One embraces change, the other less so. Who is more tolerant of each other? It seems there's sufficient polarization to say neither are terribly tolerant of one another to the extent they're each willing to peacefully endure one another.

There is also a question unasked, and that is whether tolerance is a virtue? Ought we let our neighbors who don't adhere to our moral interpretations endure our silence, or must we speak. up?

I suspect I don't disagree, which is most disagreeable. But I'm not confident that I understood what you said, so I may be wrong. — Banno

You have to tell me what you disagree with.

To restate, where P is a private language: ¬◊P.

Pinker cannot show us an example of P. One can't locate the morning star at night because it by definition is present only during the day. That's not to say nothing is there.

If there were enough interest, we might try a discussion on ChatGPT to see what happens. — Banno

I'm interested in participating, but is the suggestion that we all appear in real time and go back and forth with a discussion, or can it be adaptable to our format where we post at our leisure? I'd rather the latter only because conversational debate is very different than posting in terms of the thought and research going into each post.

Also, if it's live, the world generally operates on US Eastern Standard Time.

The insight is that private language is an all black penguin where a penguin is defined as requiring some white. You search forever for the all black penguin and you quibble over whether it has some white here or there, not realizing you don't engage in a synthetic inquiry when the inquiry was analytic all along.

"Bans are permanent and non-negotiable." — Outlander

That's true, and I don't want to suggest a change in the text of the rules so people might think there are simple ways back, but there are imaginable scenarios where things can be reconsidered, which is just an admission sometimes further review is warranted.

My point is that this case isn't such an extraordinary instance because it's all so speculative that the person even wants back or regrets his request.

No, because that's proof they're treating the root issue by avoiding the problem by using their own willpower. — Outlander

Maybe @Michael was compelled by the same powerful forces that @ProtagoranSocratist was when he asked to be banned and he couldn't stop himself from banning him, and here you go blaming Michael for what he could not control. And maybe I'm just doing the same with whatever I'm saying, and then your responses aren't to be blamed either because you're just being immovable you.

Or maybe we just take things at face value. He wanted banning, he asked for banning, and he got banning. We're not impossible to reach out to, so if he pleads temporary insanity and wants to return, we can consider it then. At this point, defenses are being made for him that he hasn't even claimed himself. It's possible he's happy not being here.

Perhaps not.

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient.

So that part of what you suggest must be correct. — Banno

I'm just a category police here, trying to keep the philosopher captive in his study and the scientist in his lab.

When Wittgenstein says language can't be private, he's not a sociologist, neurologist, or anthropologist. His view isn't dependent upon whether humans are lone predators or highly social. That is, language would theoretically exist on the day the last man stood before the world ended (and the sound would be a whimper).

This is because to attend to a feeling with a describable symbol marks it language, regardless of whether the confirmation of the symbol is by human or inanimate means.

If the validity of Wittgenstein is science dependant, he loses, even if scientificly correct, because he would then be speaking of the world of beetles and not words.

Empirical refutation or confirmation is therefore impossible.

DO you find it interesting how ubiquitous and indelible the idea of deficit is? — Banno

The idea of deficits is entirely foreign in systems that place infinite value on human life, with such designations only existing in purely pragmatic contexts, as in, I am wholly insufficient to play short stop for the Yankees, but of exact worth to all others in all ways moral.

Not sure why you inserted his race or why you thought the motivation mitigated the outcome.

Should it be true that only certain. races are afforded appropriate care, that should be remedied, but the opposite shouldn't be suggested, which is that the privileges should be flipped.

You also needn't reject every aspect of an economic system to where you must reject even its positive outcomes, especially in this instance where you suggest purely altruistic motivations would have left him not fully attended.

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. A few interesting things are happening here.

The most obvious is the prominence of the deficit model, in various guises.

The idea that disabilities need fixing.

The idea that a person with a disability cannot pay their way and will require more than they could provide.

And the related way that the focus moved so quickly from disability to care, to re-centring on the able bodied.

Offered as something for consideration, not as a negative. Why did this happen? is it justifiable? How? — Banno

I think we all wish to do what is best to make everyone's lives easier and not harder, and it's difficult to really to know what to do in contexts one has little famiilarity with. I guess my question is what might you propose the best response to the disabled would be if there are some well intentioned faux pas occuring?

This is just to say that I stand for the elderly on the bus because that's what I have been told to do and it seems the right thing to do, but now that I'm dilgently working on being more elderly, I don't know I'd take a young person's seat. I'd tell the whipper snapper to sit back down while I struggled to stand the whole time in spite of myself.

Fine. I can see a benefit in making the AI's input explicit rather than covert. Lets's see what Jamal's thoughts are. — Banno

There is no fun in playing chess software at grandmaster level. Sometimes it's fun to set it at moron level so you can beat it and feel smart.

So, where I'm going with this is AM, artificial moronism. You have the software say stupid shit and you get to ridicule it and show it what an idiot it is.

I mean that does sound more fun than having it constantly winning every argument.

I know what you're thinking. This post is from an AM generator. Nope, it's truly from yours truly.

In my way of thinking, I just think philosophers don't belong in the lab and scientists don't belong where ever it is philosophers lurk. But to the extent someone suggests an impossibility can occur (as in, "hey guys, I just found an X that's ~X"), I suppose I'd need to see that walking contradiction. If it's there, I guess the scientist can stand smugly with his discovery while the philospher's head explodes.

Ah yes, the bullet-point, the evidence of ChatGPT at work. :smirk:

As to #1, I can intuitively understand that meaning would be internal and be attached to the symbol, as in, I am annoyed (internal meaning), so I roll my eyes (the symbol). What I don't get is why the internal meaning must be attached to a symbol. I am annoyed, so some internal listing of information passes before my homunculous. I'm reminded of the Terminator when he saw the data reveal before his eyes.

Additionally, Pinker doesn't need to convince me that his view is logical. He needs to show me a brain and where all these symbols are. He's not a philosopher seeking consistency. He's a scientist seeking empirical truth.

As to #2, Witt shows the private language argument incoherent.

As to #3, yes, there is an incompatibility in Witt saying X is impossible and Pinker saying X exists regardless of logical impossibility.

I would suggest Pinker abandon his ideosyncratic mentalese position (some computational model he pulled from his ass, surely not from a lab). I just don't understand why one would posit a private sub-symbol that computes and then attaches to a public post-symbol I can see. By mentalese, I would think he would mean the stuff that precedes the sub-symbol, the computation itself, not some strange layer of first symbol to follow a second symbol.

Whether mentalese is salvagable under any imaginable scenerio is a fair question, but I might agree at this point that the Pinker model is not sustainable.

I do see what you're saying, but look at Wittgenstein's comment:

"To the extent that I do intend the construction of an English sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak English."

That is, while you search for the correct Russian term to convey your emotion (which is not denied to exist), you do so with an understanding of how you must do that, as in, what the parameters are. You are working within a publicaly agreed upon set of rules. By analogy, it's like if you're playing chess (another Russian past-time), you create all sorts of ideas in your head about how you will attack or defend, but the underlying requirement is that you do so within the rules of that game. You can't just say you're going to kick the king off the board. That is not within your creative boundaries.

That "language" (and I'm into metaphor here) of the chessboard, as in "I'm thinking of moving Rook to a4 and then the Bishop to c3" is not considered a private language just becasue it's internal. Your actual physical move of the piece was your language. It's how you communicated your decision.

The point here is that when you searched for the move on the chessboard, you were necessarily searching within the rules of the game. If you had a private language, your move would be incoherent because no one would know what you meant to do by moving your piece. However, as everyone plays and watches one another, it becomes clear what language your are using. That is referred to as the "grammar" of the game. There can be no question though that you had some thought prior to making that move, but that thought had to be within the rules of the game and so it was therefore not private.

And that goes back to the Wittgenstein quote above. That you searched for a word in English presumed you spoke English.

In my opinion, this is quite controversial, since the very method of predicting future events based on hindsight is quite dubious. As we know, history develops in fits and starts, and some languages ​​that existed 1,000 years ago (and were even considered global) are no longer used at all. This point is important to emphasize. — Astorre

I concede to speculation, but trending of languages can be observed and general observations noted.

This observation is interesting, but it may be related not to a desire to simplify, but to the native speaker's language itself — Astorre

As I've noted, much linguistic change occurs as the result of the introduction of non-native speakers (of course there's internal drift (caused by all sorts of things) as well, but this really isn't meant to be an all inclusive conversation in linguistics, much of which goes well beyond what I know). That is, people who speak other languages mix up the prior language, trending toward elimination of differences, resulting in a less complex system for the new members of the community. That is, if suddenly we see great change to a previously stable language, we can expect that a good number of adults just arrived and they are all insisting upon using that language.

In my experience, I've noticed that expressing your thoughts in nuanced language is always slower than the thought itself. I like the flow of complexity and duration, because as I speak, I have time to think about what I'll say next. — Astorre

This is more specifically on topic with the OP. The critical distinction here is whether you are saying (1) you had a thought and it was in a primordial language, not something identfiable, but a constructed idea that had not yet seen language or (2) you had a full language that identified your thought but it was compressed and then you expressed it fully into complicated words and syntax. If you go with #1, you are arguing a mentalese. If #2, you are giving room for a Wittgensteinian analysis.

Ergo, language was simpler because times were simpler. There just wasn't much to talk about or perhaps even not much time to idly ponder the things the average person does today. — Outlander

Consider the number of cases in the following languages:

Modern English - 2
German - 4
Old English -4 or 5
Middle English - 2
Cherokee - 6
Mandarin - 0

A common cause for this simplification is the introduction of adult non-native speakers into language. Adults are poor learners of language and as diverse populations enter, the language corrupts through simplification, but, interestingly does not affect the ability of the language to convey information. This points to the fact that much of language serves functions other than direct communication of thought.

Any marker that comminicates one's ethnicity, country of origin, educational level, etc. serves sociological functions. It obviously matters greatly from an evolutionary perspective that I immediately know you were raised in Germany, you were born in Boston, that you were not formally educated, etc. Consider Cherokee, unless you are very adept at language learning, you will never convince a native speaker that you grew up on the reservation if you didn't because you'll never master the complexity of the language. You'll also never match their accent.

But this is all (an interesting) aside. My point wasn't to wander down the path of language evolution as much as to say that it's entirely possible that our internal language (and please don't confuse"private language" with "internal language" in the Wittngensteinian sense) bears limited resemblance to the full expressive language we use in public where we're trying to get others to understand us.

And Wittgenstein went to great lengths not to catagorize what a language is (as in requiring particular syntax or form), but only to require that it comport to a grammar, which he defines very liberally to mean that it follows rules within a particular community of speakers and is publicly confirmable.

I will concede of course to the speculative nature of AI's attempt at extrapolation of English in the year 3500. So you know, it could not reverse engineer from 2025 backwards simply because it's not possible to predict what arbitrary elements might have existed in a language over time and then fell out.

That's why you get the phenomenon of not being able to find "the right word". There's something there we can't say. Maybe a passage in a novel gets it, maybe a scene in a movie. Sometimes nothing. — Manuel

This very issue is discussed at length in Philosophical Investigations, starting at 335 and going to 339. The critical line comes at the end of 337 where my hand is, "To the extent that I do intend the construction of an English sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak English." That is, sure, you're word searching, but you must have an appreciation for the rules of the language game you play to even engage in the search. You might not know which chess move you'll make until you find it, but you necessarily searched within the confines of the rules.

If the mind computes symbolically, we'd be heading in support of Fodor and Pinker, and we really would have to conclude that all thinking is symbolic, linguistic, and indeed, algorithmic. — Banno

This comment suggests it matters how the brain computes things and lends support does it not to the idea that Pinker and Wittgenstein operate within the same sphere, which is to offer an explanation for how the brain uses language?

I see Wittgenstein"s objective is to show us how we use langauge in our everyday lives and clarify its limitations.

I sense a category error in throwing a cognitive scientist into the ring with a philosopher.

I agree generally that Pinker et al appear facially contradictory to Wittgenstein because they assert an a priori sort of linguistic underpinning while Wittgenstein is purely posteriori in outlook (he requires public usage for langauge to exist), but I don't think there is true contradiction.

Even if langauge emerges from symbol manipulation, that doesn't suggest private langauge can exist. Under my compressive language challenge, you can preserve Wittgenstein only if you deny that shorthand language is primordial, but you must insist it is full language, publicly confirmable to grammar rules.

If I think in Latin as the last Roman, I don't have a private language as long as it can be spoken in the common language among the people.

I think this is the essence of compressed language the idea of an in language as in an in joke between the parties partaking in communication with each other. — kindred

The idea is that all language is compressed, which is to say it's contextual, to degrees greater or lesser.

So briefly and dogmatically, mentalese as an innate, computational system is incoherent. — Banno

Perhaps "incoherent" is the proper term, but there's no suggestion that thoughts emerge without all sorts of unknowable brain processes. What is incoherent is how those pre-linguistic whatevers can "mean" something. Meaning requires use of the language I say this for @T Clark's benefit as well, so as to avoid some suggestion we're delving into neuroscience. The question is whether the neural goings on can have meaning without public use, and the answer per Witt is no.

The brain’s architecture (neural nets, not symbolic computation) supports this derivative view. — Banno

Let's say it didn't, and we discovered the mind computed symbolically, why would that matter? That seems problematic, as that would suggest Wittgenstein is only valid insofar as science reveals him to be, but I'd assert his claims are entirely non-science based..

This of course is the problem. Assuming all thought is verbal is clearly not right. — T Clark

No one suggests that though. The quote only says that there are not meanings outside language but the meaning is the language.

As I noted elsewhere, the answers to your questions are not philosophy, they’re science. — T Clark

This too is incorrect because if you look at what I said above, I made no reference to brains or neuroscience. We're defining terms: language and meaning.

Seems to me honestly a cavalier attitude. — boethius

Living on the edge, flying by the seat in my pants, relying upon the kindness of strangers.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict the regulators will never come over and try to curb stomp our lemonade stand into the ground, nor will they seize our data and read your musings one day and herald you as a prophet for having tried to save us from ourselves.

At this point you talk to yourself, agreeing with your wisdom, while everyone else wonders why.

If you're sure it's pearls before swine, just accept our stubborn moroness.

Freedom of speech does pretty much exist in America, land of the free. — boethius

I mean it's probably safer in the US, but not worth the hassle for that added safety. It strikes me as overkill to make us bulletproof. It feels like you might be catastrophizing and overburdening.

In other words, if we do our best to be above board, we'll be fine in the UK.

That post was a cross-post, posted before you chastised me. :up:

Like an amalgam of everyone on TPF? Tempting though it is, my instinct is that the wider the range of data, the more it would approach a regular LLM like ChatGPT and lose its own point of view. — Jamal

You believe the posters here represent a cross section of the public at large?

I have asked ChatGpt to mimic me based upon its interactions with me, but it does a poor job. I'm much funnier. If @Banno wants a convincing mimic, no need to turn towards AI. I could do a fine job, but I'd quickly be outed. Again, I'm much funnier.