The function of Existentialists values is to liberate humankind from craven fear, petty anxiety and apathy or tedium. Existentialists values intensify consciousness, arouse the passions, and commit the individual to a cause of action that will engage their total energies — Rob J Kennedy

I assume this quotation is from Hazel Barnes.
It gives me a a starting-point to explain my attitude to existentialism.
The quotation suggests that it belongs alongside Stoicism and Epicureanism (and perhaps Scholastic Christianity and Buddhism) in that basing a way of life on a philosophy of life. I realize that the distinction is a complicated, but it enables me to articulate my own attitude.

As a way of life, existentialism had and has considerable appeal. Despite its tendency to atheism (though there are or were Christian Existentialists and Kierkegaard), it has the classic elements of a religion - a diagnosis of the human condition and a recipe for escaping it. (The escape, of course, is explained by Hazel Barnes' quotation "Existentialists values ........ arouse the passions, and commit the individual to a cause of action that will engage their total energies." This recipe is more or less content-free so differs from full-on religions.)

This explains, I would think, why it became so influential across so many fields. The, as it were innate, appeal, was surely reinforced by the post-war world and the coincidence that Sartre and de Beauvoir appeared on the scene at that time. It captured and reinforced the liberation experienced by many people as WW2 ended. (After thought - It would be quite wrong to think that the end of WW2 in any way influenced Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Sartre. The development of existentialism must surely have been influenced by the nineteenth and possibly the early twentieth century. I'm only saying that the end of WW2 affected the reception of it.)

I think it deserves to be up there with Stoicism &c and so to be a serious contribution to the philosophical tradition. But no, I'm not going to sign up.

Why?

I don't intend to try to find fault with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre all at the same time. But here's one fundamental issue I choose to discuss. I think it is clearest in Sartre, though I could be wrong.

The starting-point for Existentialism is our being "thrown" into the world and life. So it is hard to understand why Sartre's Being-for-itself turns out to be something so abstract and more or less instantly recognizable as a Cartesian subject. (Heidegger's version is, to my mind, even more abstract and even more puzzling.) But the greatest issue with this very attractive idea is that it presupposes that our lives start as conscious, reflective beings - more or less, as adults. But we start our lives either at birth or shortly before. We become reflective beings some years after that - and we don't have any choice in the matter, or perhaps better, we are incapable of meaningful choices for some time after our lives begin. Though it is true that the world that I am part of and which makes me what I am is a not a matter of choice, but of chance, in a sense.

The idea is that, as subjectivities, we are radically free. Existence precedes essence. If I wanted to be picky, I could expatiate on the point that to exist requires an essence. But I get the point, I think. Roughly, we create ourselves in our interactions with the world - or does the world create us by its interactions with us? Both.

The complete last sentence of Hazel Barnes' quotation is "Existentialists values intensify consciousness, arouse the passions, and commit the individual to a cause of action that will engage their total energies." A promise of relief from the real pains of anxiety in a meaningless world and also a promise of trouble and fear. But perhaps that's just me. Either way, we are born as embodied beings with instincts primarily directed to survival and reproduction and a drive to seek patterns in the world and a tendency to respond to reward and punishment appropriately. Not quite Sartre's (or the empiricists') blank sheet of paper.

While I understand the appeal of commitment as an escape from anxiety and that values become valuable 0nly when human beings adopt them, the process puzzles me because in itself, it seems as random and meaningless as everything else. This, if I remember right, is what we are presented with in Camus' Outsider. But, again from memory, Mathieu's commitment in the third book of Sartre's Roads to Freedom is actually very similar; it doesn't read like a choice made in an enthusiastic moment of decision; or that's how I remember it.

Finally, looking back at the first sentence in Hazel Barnes' quotation - "The function of Existentialists values is to liberate humankind from craven fear, petty anxiety and apathy or tedium." - I notice the powerful rhetoric that she chooses to attach to "humankind", "fear" and "anxiety". This is not existentialist cool at all, is it? Her commitment here is to rouse people from apathy and tedium, in ways that seem to me now strongly reminiscent of the rhetoric that many existentialists wanted to escape from.

we are the simulated people — noAxioms

So I have to imagine myself as being a sim - and hence not a person - and not knowing it?

The Turing test was never intended as a test of consciousness. — noAxioms

So what was it intended to be a test for? (I assume you mean "intended by Turing"?)

Because the people implementing them didn't think about all the cases. There are usually edge cases they didn't think of, or interactions between features they didn't plan for. — flannel jesus

Yes. But how realistic is it to set out to think about all the edge cases and/or all the interactions between all the features?

A heart cell has a certain set of rules it follows, and when it fails to execute those rules it is faulty. When a video game, like the one you mentioned in the OP, Diablo, is facing a bug, its following the rules just not the expectations involved in its design. — 013zen

Yes. But I find it very hard to state the point clearly. I think we have to distinguish them this way. When my heart fails to fulfil it purpose - what it is "designed" to do, the fault is not in the design, but in the execution of them. When a bug arises in a program, there is a fault in the design of the game/program, not in the execution of the rules.

I see the basic issue of the thread as something like this:- How is it possible for the rules that describe a game to be wrong? and the underlying issue is about the way that a set of rules can produce surprising (counter-intuitive) results.

Here again, the quoted comment concerns the Turing test, not the simulation hypothesis. — noAxioms

Quite so. But I notice that you don't disagree with what I say. My argument is that if one starts the Turing test by specifying that the subject is a machine, the test cannot provide evidence to the contrary and this is the version that I have most commonly seen. But if one did start by specifying that it is a person, one would not get any evidence to the contrary either. (If the responses from the machine seem to be intelligent or sentient or whatever, we have to decide whether the responses really are intelligent or sentient or whatever.) Knowing what the subject of the test is governs one's interpretation of the replies, which consequently can't provide evidence either way. That applies also to your version, in which one doesn't know whether the subject is machine or person (and to a version I've seen that provides two subjects, one machine and one human)
The point is that it is not a question of evidence for or against without a context that guides interpretation of the evidence.

If there was, much of the p-zombie argument would be immediately settled by some empirical test. — noAxioms

Quite so, and the set-up specifies that there can be no empirical evidence. But then, the argument is devised as a thought-experiment with the aim of persuading us to accept that there are qualia, or some such nonsense.

The whole point of the term 'conscious' is that it is always defined in such a way that is immune from empirical evidence. — noAxioms

Quite so. That's why the attempt to distinguish between the two on the basis of empirical evidence (Turing test) is hopeless.

I've even been charged human health insurance rates for a diagnosis provided by a machine, and I protested it at the time. — noAxioms

That's capitalism for you. But it might turn out that the machine is more successful than human beings at that specific task,

If it does, it is probably already considerably more intelligent than humans, since it requires far more smarts to imitate something you are not that it does to just be yourself. — noAxioms

I think that a machine can diagnose some medical conditions. Whether it can imitate diagnosing any medical conditions is not at all clear to me.

I am a moderator on a different forum, and one job is to spot new members that are not human. — noAxioms

I frequent another forum which developed criteria for sniffing out AI. However, I may be wrong, but I don't think there is any follow-up on whether people's judgements are correct or not. Do you get confirmation about whether your "spots" are correct or not?

The entity is not human, and to imitate human responses, especially those involving human emotions, would require superior ability. — noAxioms

Parrots imitate talking. Are they smarter than human beings?

There are only fully simulated people inside 'the system', — noAxioms

I thought you said that there were people inside the system. Now I'm really confused.

Progress would not be measured by fooling people, but by showing there are processes that work like our brains do. — Relativist

Yes, the appeal to how things work inside is a popular refuge in these uncertain times. But we don't (can't) rely on our limited understanding of how we work to establish what is the same and what is different. Even if we could, I would not be persuaded to rule out the possibility of personhood simply on the grounds of different internal physical structures. The output is what counts most.

Yah, like in Nietzsche's, Heidegger's, Sartre's et. al. call for self actualization or authenticity. — ENOAH

Yes. But they are all philosophers with a mission. Although, thinking about it, I'm not at all sure that the distinction really stands up.

Yes. The actual, not the becoming (of Mind and its empty, fleeting attachments; its incccessant workings out); but the Being (of the human Organism, and its breathing etc.). — ENOAH

Yes. But then I remember that some fleeting things are worth attending to and that I sometimes wish that some non-fleeting things would flee. I'm a bit of a contrarian, I'm afraid.

Contrast this with the medieval ideal vis-a-vis the trades. Yes, it was good to be profitable, to grow and train others. However, "being a great tradesman" was far more likely to be defined in terms of the quality and beauty of the products, not simply growth and volume. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's no doubt that there are important - and oft-neglected values here. They struggle to be seen or heard in the world as it is.

I don't love Marx, but the part about people becoming alienated from their work seems all to true. And once that happens, income becomes the obvious measuring stick for success. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's right. The first question when you meet someone for the first time - politely disguised under the question what one's employment is.

After the Black Death, there was a shortage of labour (because so many people had died). So workers tended to move to where they were better paid. The aristocracy were outraged by this, and by their demands and tried hard to prevent them (without paying them any more). It didn't work very well. It wasn't until much later (18th century) that employers realized the great advantage to themselves of employing free people for a wage, namely, that they had no responsibility for them beyond the work (e.g. welfare, health and safety) and could simply dismiss them when they weren't needed. Workers took great exception to this (rightly). (Luddites &c.)

This may not be quite what you had in mind:-

‘Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . . the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.’

Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

It shows how deeply embedded the thinking in terms of money is and how damaging it is. Yet it is not just a question of compiling a happiness index. There's no getting away from the need to prioritze and allocate resources accordingly; the money measure is quite helpful as a way of doing that.

People misunderstand what communism, as opposed to state socialism, is all about and what Marx thought was the culmination of his revolution:-

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, Vol. 1, Part 1.

Though this can be taken in many ways. Maybe he under-rates the value of specialization.

Thinking traps the philosopher, like Kierkegaard, who was too smart for his own good, I guess. — Astrophel

You remind me of Wittgenstein's fly trapped in a bottle. Or this:-

FLY
A fat fly fuddles for an exit
At the window-pane,
Bluntly, stubbornly, it inspects it,
Like a brain
Nonplussed by a seemingly simple sentence
In a book,
Which the glaze of unduly protracted acquaintance
Has turned to gobbledly-gook.

A few inches above where the fly fizzes
A gap of air
Waits, but this has
Not yet been vouchsafed to the fly.
Only retreat and loop or swoop of despair
will give it the sky.

Christopher Reid, Expanded Universes,

Hard to simply "dock" the meditation, the thinking and the curiosity. It is like docking one's very being-in-the-world — Astrophel

Can one dock one's being-in-the-world without docking one's self, and is that possible? Philosophy often seems to me to under-rate the difficulty of such things. In philosophy, all that is needed is a flourish of words and the thing is done. That's where religion scores, because it recognizes and addresses the need for "metanoia" or conversion. Yet one can find traces of it in what is said in philosophy.

By contrast one who doesn't even know is happy in the mundane, . — ENOAH

You remind me of the conclusion of Voltaire's Candide. What's wrong with that, if it works for you? Perhaps it's as much a matter of reconciling oneself to the actual, rather than working out something else.

It is the people in the simulation that are tasked with finding evidence that they are the subject of a simulation. What we're called by the occupants of the reality running the simulation is irrelevant. — noAxioms

I think that you are not talking about the same question as Relativist. (See below). You are positing that it is people who are "in" the sim - i.e. (I assume) being fed the data.
Plus, if I've understood you, you are positing that the subjects cannot communicate with whatever is running the sim - merely they merely seem to themselves to communicate.

And if a machine passes the test (it's a text test, so there's no robot body that also has to be convincing), then it exhibits intelligent behavior. The test is not too weak. — noAxioms

Here, you are positing that you are starting with a machine. In that case, the question is whether the behaviour is really intelligent or merely seems to be intelligent. But if it's a machine, we already know that it is not intelligent. Actually, I don't think that is right, but even if the response was intelligent, it does not follow that the machine is conscious or sentient.

The Turing Test is passed by fooling people into believing there's a human giving responses in a conversation. — Relativist

I think that you are not talking about the same test as noAxioms. (See above). Plus you are positing that it is a machine that is responding, so you are begging the question. (As Turing also does in his formulation of the test.)

The fundamental point is whether we can even formulate the question without begging it. We have to identify the subject of the Turing test as a machine or a person. Whichever we say, we will interpret the responses in different ways. Whatever the machine responds, we will interpret the response as that of a machine - and that will be true. Whatever the person responds, we will interpret the response as that of a person - and that will be true. There is no magic empirical bullet of evidence that will settle the issue.

Remember, we're not worrying about what those running the simulation are calling the simulated things. We're supposing that we are the subjects here, the ones being simulated, and we (and only we) call ourselves human beings or people. That's the only definition that matters.
It is the people in the simulation that are tasked with finding evidence that they are the subject of a simulation. What we're called by the occupants of the reality running the simulation is irrelevant. — noAxioms

So how does this question differ from the brain in a vat, from Descartes' demon or from the supposed possibility that we are all dreaming?

The topic isn't about how to run a sim. The topic is about what it's like to be one. — noAxioms

So how does this topic differ from the question what it's like to be a bat?

I'm afraid I didn't realize what the philosophical background is, essentially, Bostrom. I don't find the question interesting, because if we posit that there is no way of telling, then there is no way of telling. Similarly, if there's no way to be a bat without becoming a bat, we can't know what it's like to be a bat.
The interesting question is under what circumstances we would accept that something we designed and built is a conscious being, i.e. a (non-human) person.

That's kind of like suggesting that God is unethical to have created a universe that has beings that feel bad, and yes, there are those that suggest exactly that. — noAxioms

This is the traditional problem of evil. I am one of those who think the problem has no solution and that therefore no such God exists. Of course, that doesn't prove that there are not other gods around or that it is only the Christian conception of God is wrong.

There are definitely war elements in both, but that makes it more an analogy than a simulation. The do run simulations of war all the time, pretty much continuously. — noAxioms

I wish I knew what the difference is between a simulation and an imitation, a simulation and a mimicry, a simulation and an analogy, and a simulation and a model.

A simulated person would be a person, just in a different universe (the simulated one). It's likely quite a small universe. You seem to define 'person' as a human in this universe, and no, the simulated person would not be that. — noAxioms

I describe human beings, in contexts like this, as our paradigm of a person. That's not exactly a definition - I'm not aware of any definition that is adequate. A paradigm, for me, is an example or sample that one uses in an ostensive definition. However, I think that looking for definitions is inadequate on its own, because the important feature of a people is the way we interact with them as different from the way we interact with objects.

I have to say, if these beings are to be conscious, I wish you luck in getting your project through your research ethics committee.

My question now, is why not just talk about people living in a different universe? (I'm not going to get picky about the point that the sims you are describing are clearly in the same universe as we are. I would prefer to describe their situation as being in a different lived world from us. Though even that is not quite right.)

Talking of sims, do you regard chess or (American) football as a simulation of war? That is what they say of both (only they don't use the word "simulation".)

The Japanese Buddhists I most recently had contact with were Pure Land Buddhists who sermonised against any effort to meditate as being ‘own-effort’, and incapable of producing merit. — Wayfarer

They've got a point. From what I've read, Zen encourages effort, while at the same time suggesting that it is beside the point. Typical.

at my age I can no longer assume the customary cross-legged posture that I persisted with for many years. — Wayfarer

I've seen discussions of this that do not prioritize that, or any other, particular posture. Sitting in a straight-backed chair (but upright, not using the back) and lying on one's back, - and there's always walking (slowly). Thich Nat Hanh has a discussion somewhere that suggests that anything that happens in ordinary life can be a bell, calling us back to meditation.

I’m trying to find a way back into some kind of community of practice, but it’s not easy. — Wayfarer

The crucial thing for joining a community, IMO, is turning up and trying to participate somehow - provided they will at least accept you being there.
There are a lot of people who are inclined to take meditation/mindfulness seriously, but find it difficult to work out what suits them. (I'm one of them.)

And the conservative American response to that is that it’s communism. — Wayfarer

The fact that they cling on to that defunct threat shows how much they need something to be afraid of.

The logic of cogito ergo sum is neither rationalisation nor myth, it is the indubitable fact that, in order to be subject to an illusion, there must be a subject. — Wayfarer

The analysis of Descartes' argument is a bit off-topic here, so I'll resist commenting.

I have my doubts about Descartes, in that I believe his dualistic separation of the physical and mental as separate substances is profoundly problematical and has had hugely deleterious consequences for Western culture, but as for the essential veracity of his ‘cogito’ argument, I have no doubts. — Wayfarer

But I can't resist saying that I agree with you.

I had the idea that zombies don’t feel pain, at least they never do in zombie flicks. You have to literally dismember or disintegrate them to overcome them, merely inflicting blows or wounds does nothing. — Wayfarer

Yes. I did not put my point well. I was thinking of philosophical zombies, which would (if I've understood the idea correctly) not behave like zombies in the flicks.

There's a contradiction here. People is animal. A machine is not animal. But a machine can be people? That means a machine is animal and not animal. — noAxioms

I mean, deep down, you're a machine as well running under the same physics. I think you're confusing determinism with predictability. — noAxioms

Are these two remarks compatible? My point is that there is no easy and clear way to state what the Turing hypothesis is trying to articulate.

I think you are again envisioning imitation people, like Replicants. That's a very different thing than the simulation hypothesis which does not involve machines pretending to be people. — noAxioms

Thank you for the clarification. I misunderstood what the thread was about. My apologies. It is clear now that I haven't understood what the simulation hypothesis is. However, when I checked the Wikipedia - Simulation hypothesis, I found:-

Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct).

For me, a conscious being is a person and a simulated person is not a person, so this confuses me. Can you perhaps clarify?

why isn't 'dubit' a word? It ought to be. — noAxioms

Well, since you have now used it, and I understand it (roughly, I think), it is a word now. Who knows, it may catch on and then you'll be awarded a place in the dictionaries of the future!


I agree that BiV is a different kettle of fish and I don't particularly want to pursue it, but I can't resist one reply, because your remark was so incomprehensible to me. I don't expect to resolve our differences, just to clarify them a bit.

You do not understand what "refer" means, in other words. — L'éléphant

You seem to think I cannot refer to anything that I have not experienced. But the reference of a word is established in the language in general, not by what I may or may not have experienced. So when I can refer to the President of the United States even if I don't know that Joe Biden is the President.

Then you misunderstand what "true" means in statements. — L'éléphant

I agree with @noAxioms, except that I would add that it's not something it can justify on the basis of its subjective experience.

Similarly, a person (and not a brain) is what is conscious. Not even that, because an environment is also needed. — noAxioms

Yes, that's right. I agree also that persons, as we understand them, can only exist in an environment. Whether one includes that environment as part of the person or not is a tricky question and I don't know the answer. In our paradigm case (the only one that we actually know), a person is a human being, i.e. an animal. An animal is a physical body. (I'm setting aside the dualistic possibility of persons existing without a body.) Some physical structures are machines, and hence not animals, but I don't see why such structures cannot possibly constitute people.
But if they are to constitute people, they would indeed need at least to behave as people spontaneously and not because they are following a detailed set of instructions about what to do and when. They need to learn to do that for themselves. So a machine that was designed and built to behave as a person could not be anything except a sim.

It has to start somewhere, so the womb would be outside the system, an imitation womb, empirically (to the child) indistinguishable from a real mother, in every way. I suppose the placenta would be included in the system since it is, after all, the child and not the mother, but when it is severed, the sim needs to remember which half to keep as part of the system. — noAxioms

So I think you are right to argue that some such process as this would be necessary to create a machine person. The catch is that I'm not at all sure that this would be a sim, rather than a real person - especially as the process of its creation would be very close to the process of creating human beings. I think this is the same point as here:-

You said you would start the sim as a zygote. I am asking: what is the difference between this zygote and a zygote in reality? Or is the zygote you are postulating a mere simulation of a zygote? If so, that seems problematic. — NotAristotle

Irrationality is required for consciousness? A computer is rational? I question both. Deterministic is not not rationality. I do agree that irrationality is a trait of any living creature, and a necessary one. — noAxioms

Well, perhaps I'm being provoking. My point is that when people act, they do so on the basis of values that they hold, that is, their emotions and desires. It may be a distortion to call them irrational, but standard ideas of logic and reason are well recognized (since Aristotle) to be incapable of generating actions on their own.
Calculating is widely recognized as a rational activity. To me, it makes no sense to deny that computers can calculate. The catch is that such rational activities are not sufficient to be recognized as a person. Ever since the Romantic protest against the Enlightenment, emotion and desire have been regarded as essential elements of being a human person.

Sometimes. One is often reft of rational thought while dreaming, but not always. I can tell sometimes, and react to knowing so. — noAxioms

This may be a side-issue. I know that there is an issue about lucid dreaming. But I doubt whether the unsupported memory of a dreamer is sufficient to establish the phenomenon, except that I accept that the reports exist and I don't believe they are lies. But the possibility that the dreamer is dreaming the phenomenon cannot, it seems to me, be excluded.

To a simulation of low level physics, they pretty much are the exact same category, — noAxioms

I don't know what you mean by "a simulation of low level physics", but you clearly have a different concept of categories from mine.

That's (sc. Descartes' argument) a great example of rationalization. It was his target all along. — noAxioms

A side-issue. If you call it a rationalization, you have already decided the argument is invalid or unsound. But knowing that someone had in mind a specific conclusion before formulating the argument does not, of itself, show that their argument is invalid or unsound.

Would a simulation of agonising pain be actually painful? If it was, it can't really be a simulation, but as the primary attribute of pain is the feeling of pain, there's nothing else to simulate. — Wayfarer

Another side-issue, but you are presupposing a dualistic concept of pain. On that concept, you are right. But whatever exactly may be the relevant conception of pain, I think your point survives, in the sense that whatever caused the pain would have to cause real pain and not zombie pain, just as the anger would have to be real anger, etc.

If I am a BIV, I cannot make claims like "I am a brain in a vat" because I am making no reference to the "brain" and "vat". So, if I say that sentence, it is false. — L'éléphant

If I am a brain in a vat, my claim is true, even if I can't refer to brain and vat, so long as "brain" and "vat" refer to the appropriate objects in that context. Perhaps I cannot know that my claim is true, but that's different. Actually, I don't really see why a brain in a vat cannot refer to itself as a brain in a vat.

I notice that you are not arguing that my summary is wrong and I accept that there's much complication when you start considering things in more detail.

This is a consequence of modern philosophical innovations and the Reformation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, of course it is. And one should mention the revival of Ancient Greek Philosophy specifically as a way of thinking about one's way of life in a recognizably philosophical, as opposed to religious, way.

It seems like a lot of the Buddhism that makes it to the West comes from monastics, not necessarily reflecting the laity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

From my observation that's true.

I am not sure how different this really is from Buddhism as practiced by the laity. It seems like a lot of the Buddhism that makes it to the West comes from monastics, not necessarily reflecting the laity. People act shocked that Buddhists are carrying out genocides against Muslims in their lands because they think of Buddhism primarily in terms of monasticism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are indeed Buddhist monks coming to the West. Some of them are returnees. And it does somewhat slant the general impression. But Buddhism is no different from every other religion (so far as I can see). There are different strands at work, but there are common themes - fundamentalism and violence among them. What religions are (especially when they become embedded in a society and have to deal with the local power structures), and what they aspire to are rather different things. I realize that monasticism is still alive and well in Christianity, and I'm inclined to believe monasticism in Christianity shares a lot with monasticism in other religions. It's the surrounding conceptual structures that interest me here.

The Medieval uncomfortableness with commerce and the vice of "coveting/grasping" has become essentially a virtue, which casts the old homeless, impoverished saints in a new light. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I assume you know about Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and the slogan "Private Vices, Public Virtues" (or at least Benefits). I think the genie is out of the bottle now. In any case, there was plenty of coveting and grasping going on even in the Middle Ages. It's the presentation and propaganda that has changed.

I always find it ironic when conservatives are so out of sorts at the sight of homeless people in San Francisco, their very existence, given who the city is named after. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't hear much about San Francisco, but I see your point. The rational response of anyone who is horrified by homelessness is to ensure that sufficient help is provided to prevent it occurring and sort it out when it does. One has to conclude that what horrifies them is not the fact of homelessness, but it being visible.

Yes. Christianity has a similar trope. So does Islam. My point is that in Bhuddhism the shift is not merely cognitive. It's very complicated. — Ludwig V

On further thought, although it is true that Western philosophy does not pay much attention to it, training is not treated as an important feature of its practice. But it is. Philosophers often speak as if the distinction between what is rational and what isn't, between what is logically true and what isn't is available to everybody instantly. But anyone who teaches introductory philosophy knows that it isn't so. There is a moment of dogma when philosophy's ideas (and practice) have to be taught and much philosophical discussion is incomprehensible without it.
Even empiricism requires explanation and teaching. If it were not so, "naive" realism would be the final arbiter of perception and philosophy could not rise above common sense.

But I suppose that the difference is that this initiation or induction is not thought to require a "metanoia",

It gets more complicated. Some of what Wittgenstein says about philosophy comes to close to suggesting something like a "metanoia". Arguably, that is exactly what Berkeley is looking for - but then, he is seeking to persuade us to accept Christianity.

That was known, at one point in history, as 'metanoia', although that is now usually translated simply as 'repentance', thereby blurring the distinction between insight and belief. Originally it meant 'mental transformation' or something like a cognitive shift. — Wayfarer

Yes. Christianity has a similar trope. So does Islam. My point is that in Bhuddhism the shift is not merely cognitive. It's very complicated.

Most of the opponents of machine consciousness simply refuse to use the word to describe a machine doing the same thing a human is doing. — noAxioms

I don't think this is Lewis Carroll's tortoise arguing with Achilles. Understanding this is heart of the problem. We need to be much more careful about what "doing" means in the context of planets and the weather and in the context of people. People and inanimate objects are not in the same category, which means that understanding planets or the weather and understanding people involve different language-games. Machines have a foot in both camps. The answers are not obvious.

Ditto for the thermostat. It doesn't react any more to the sensory input other than to convey a signal. So maybe my boiler is crudely conscious because it processes the input of its senses. — noAxioms

My boiler, on its own, is clearly not conscious, even if it contains a thermostat to switch it off when the water is sufficiently hot. Neither is the thermostat that switches it on. Neither keeps the house warm. What keeps the house warm, (not too hot and not too cold) is the entire system including the water, the pump and the radiators, with its feedback loops and not any one component. You can call the system "crudely conscious" if you like, but I think few people will follow you. But you are right that it is in some ways like a conscious being.
A computer is arguably more like a conscious being, that it is probably too rational to count as one. AI is more like. There's no simple, once-for-all, distinction.
One reason why it is so hard is that it is not just a question of a matter of fact about the machine (putative person) but also of how we treat them. So there's a circularity in the debate.

If I could experience the real world, then be hooked up to a machine that simulates the same thing I have experienced, seamlessly, that I would not be able to tell the difference, then the theory has made its point. — L'éléphant

If that's the point, we don't need the theory. We all experience dreams from time to time. And we know how to tell the difference. But we can't tell the difference while we are dreaming. What's so exciting about the theory?

I believe the important philosophical perspective they bring is that of non-dualism. — Wayfarer

Yes, but there is also the idea that understanding requires training the mind - or maybe even reconstructing it. (I mean, by meditation, of course) Christianity, it seems to me, talks a great deal about belief and so presents itself as primarily a matter of doctrine. (Judaism emphasizes law, Islam acceptance, and so on.) This is complicated and not a sharp distinction, but the emphasis is there and sets these views apart from Western empiricism and rationalism.

Encounter a bank teller and think of all that comes to mind in terms of what a bank teller qua bank teller is, and you will have a list of all a bank teller Does. — Astrophel

This is the difference between what a bank teller IS and what a bank teller DOES. Popper, in the Open Society, identifies this difference as part of the difference between science and (some kinds of) philosophy. (Maybe in other places as well - I just don't know.) It seems to me a very important difference.

I agree that its feedback, but isn't feedback a sort of circular causality? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. It's like the difference between parasitism and symbiosis. To put it this way, they are the same phenomenon, except that parasitism damages the host, and symbiosis benefits (or at least does not damage) the host. Or think of the difference between murder and execution, which both mean killing, but in different contexts, or with different evaluations.

More helpful than what? A systems view of language? But then it's always been obvious that language is a social practice and this alone doesn't really elucidate any of the big questions in philosophy of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, more helpful than a systems view of language. I'm not sure what was obvious before Philosophical Investigations and How to do things with words. Part of the point of such views is that they encourage us to consider the possibility that (some of) the big questions in the philosophy of language are the result of the systems view of language. We could call them bugs.

Attempts to unpack what "social practices" are seem to lead to more questions. E.g., if rule following is just based on "the expectations of others," what are we to make of apparent rule following in animal behavior, biology, and "law-like" behavior in nature? Are these different sorts of rules? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein took us only so far, leaving us to take the idea further. These are really interesting questions. I'm not dogmatic about the answers. But surely that the "higher" mammals, at least, are capable of responding to the expectations of others, because of the way they interact with us. Whether the same applies to, for example, the social insects or schools of fish is another question. Lots of difference cases, no expectation of a tidy distinction.
The short answer to your last question is Yes, of course.

I think this is a good classification. Although, they can also blend together a bit. E.g., the black swan causes us to discover the Type 2 problem, or the Type 2 problem opens up the possibility of exploiting incoherencies in a system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:smile: Of course they blend and interact. I regard that as a feature, not a bug.

Kripke, unlike the later Wittgenstein, could not accept the non-existence of a universal and shared semantic foundation. — sime

I have the impression that Wittgenstein did think that "way of life" and "human practices" gave a shared context. If they don't, how could he think they explained how come we agree about the interpretation (application) of a rule?

For Wittgenstein, any assertibility criteria can be used for defining the meaning of 'grasping' a rule, and not necessarily the same criteria on each and every occasion that the rule is said to be 'used'. And a speaker is in his rights to provide his own assertibility criteria for decoding what he says, even if his listeners insist on using different assertibility criteria when trying to understanding the speaker's words. — sime

On the other hand, you are quite right that human life is as much the stage for divergence and disagreement as a shared basis of consensus. The importance of the idea is that human life is both a basis for agreement and the common ground that is necessary for divergence and disagreement to develop.

I feel like too much is dismissed as unknowable because it can't be formalized in static systems, as if the limit of current modeling abilities is the limit of knowledge. Sort of like how many in physics say the universe must be computable because we lack an understanding of how things would be "decidable" otherwise. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am pretty confident that the first sentence is right. As to the second sentence, I find myself considering the possibility that the two concepts of decidability and computability may be defined in terms of each other. If they are not, then I'm rather unclear what they mean.

Once we locate the proximate source of meaning in social practices, the obvious next question is "what causes those practices to be what they are?" I find some phenomenological explanations of how predication arises quite plausible, but then these lead to the question: "why is human phenomenology this way?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that's part of what I'm saying. Any proposed foundation will generate a question why that is so. There are only two ways to stop the regress - first, find an indubitable, self-evident, axiomatic starting-point or second, turn the regress into a loop. Neither is very satisfactory. On the other hand, I don't find the idea that there will always be unanswered questions or that our explanations are incomplete and no matter how fast we run, we will never arrive at the Grand Theory of Everything. None of that means that what we call following a rule is not the result of human practices and way of life.

If we say, "well the natural world is involved in meanings, as well as human cognitive architecture, the phenomenology of human experience, intentionality, and purpose," though, which I think we must, then the role of social practices seems to slide back towards the merely obvious. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure that this is much of an objection to what Wittgenstein is trying to do - assembling reminders to enable us to find the way out of the bottle. Like the fly, once we've seen the way out, it is obvious. He starts on the basis that everything is in plain sight. Actually, this sounds like the well-worn "trivial or false" dilemmas that analytic philosophers used to be so fond of.

It's easier to have destructive certainties when you allow them to sit apart from one another, and so to selectively decide where reason applies. So, yes we should be skeptical of certainties, but we should also not be terrified of them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I think that Hume is very sensible when he distinguishes between judicious or moderate scepticism and radical or Pyrrhonic scepticism. (He thinks the former is necessary and wise and the latter is unhinged; he recommends a month in the country for anyone suffering from it.)
I think that a parallel critique of certainty is entirely appropriate. A judicious and moderate certainty is indeed wise, but a radical and dogmatic certainty is not only divisive (but, let's be blunt about this, people love a fight, especially when they can join in) but also unlikely to stand up to the test of debate.
When I asked whether we have a sound basis for making large-scale judgements about movements of ideas in the past - especially the distant past, I did intend the question as a reminder of the complications involved in reading those texts and the need for caution in evaluating them. I was particularly exercised by what appeared to be Heidegger's nostalgia for scholastic philosophy and by doubts about how far it is reasonable to apply modern philosophical ideas to what are much more like religious texts rather than what we would think of as philosophy. I know we think we can separate the two, but I'm not sure about how appropriate that is. It depends, I suppose, on what the project is.
I have to admit, however, that I have a prejudice about any pronouncement about History or Culture (Ancient or Modern). The grand and large scale too often sweeps aside nuance and detail and creates distortions in doing so.

Keep in mind that I am not supporting the simulation hypothesis in any form. I'm looking for likely ways to debunk it, but in the end, there can be no proof. — noAxioms

Thank you for telling me that. It helps a lot.

I think that sounds like magic, but everyone else is taking it seriously, — RogueAI

I agree with you, though I would describe it as hand-waving. I agree also that sometimes it is best to roll with the punch if someone takes an idea seriously and I don't. I've done it myself. It may not result in them changing their mind, but it does allow some exploration and clarification.

You and the frog both make your own decisions, not some AI trying to fool the subject by making a frog shape behave like a frog. — noAxioms

So if I miniaturized the AI hardware and grafted it into the frog, it becomes a simulation instead of a VR?

Conway's Game-of-Life (GoL) is not in any way derived from the world in which we live, so there's a counterexample to that assertion. — noAxioms

What made the game? Though I grant you, it is quite different from the kinds of simulation we have been talking about, and far from a VR. But it is an abstraction from the world in which Conway - and you and I - live.
There's an ambiguity here. There's a sense of "world" in which it comprises everything that exists. There are other similar words that aim to capture the same or similar ideas - "universe", "cosmos" and in philosophy "Reality", "Existence". There is another sense in which we speak of "my world" and "your world" and "the lived world" or "the world of physics" or "the world of politics. I thought we were using "world" in the first sense.

The intent in that example (sc. the simulation of a car crash) is to find an optimal design based on the simulation results. Not so under GoL. — noAxioms

I agree. I can't answer for Conway's intent, but it looks to me as if the intent is to explore and play with the possibilities of a particular kind of system. In which it has definitely succeeded, in most interesting ways.

Those (sc. Star Trek and Star Wars) are not simulations. Heck, the physics of those worlds are both quite different than our own — noAxioms

Well, I would say that those films are simulations of a fantasy scenario/world. But I'm not fussed about the vocabulary here. I am fussed about the idea that they have no connection with the actual world. That is simply false. For a start, there are human beings in it, not to mention space ships, planets and suns. As to the physics being different, that doesn't seem to bother people like Hume ("the sun might not rise tomorrow morning") or Putnam ("Twin Earth"). We can, after all, imagine that physics is different from our current one, and, believe it or not, there have been people who did not believe in our physics, but something quite different. Perhaps there still are.

Yes, that's the idea (one of them) (sc. the idea that VR might become good enough to deceive people) under consideration here. How do you know it's false? Just asserting it false is beyond weak. — noAxioms

Yes, there may be a need to say more. But the idea that VR might be used to deceive people itself presupposes that what is presented by the VR is not real. What might be more troublesome is a VR that re-presented the actual world around the wearer. Pointless, though there might well be a use for it in some medical situations. On the other hand, it couldn't work unless it was possible for the wearer to actually (really) act.

Clearly, we know that human beings are persons without knowing (in any detail) about their internal physics. - Ludwig V
The idealists for one would disagree with this. — noAxioms

I have the impression that idealists do not think that human beings have any internal physics. (Do they even think there is any such thing as physics?) I was not taking that issue into account, but was assuming a shared background assumption that we could call common sense. Are you an idealist?

Quite so. Perhaps another time.

if not all people/creatures are conscious in the same way (a process running the same physics). — noAxioms

I'm not sure about whether or in what way the actual physics of the person/computer are relevant. Clearly, we know that human beings are persons without knowing (in any detail) about their internal physics. On the other hand, the commentary on the current AIs seems unanimous in thinking that the details of the software are.

OK, if not all the people are simulated the same, then the ones that are not (the NPC's) would be fake, not conscious, — noAxioms

One needs to specify that "the same" means here. Otherwise, any difference between people (such as brain weight or skin colour) could lead to classifying them as not conscious, not people. I'm sorry, what are NPCs?

Sort of. Yes, they have a model. No, it isn't a model of something that exists. There isn't a 'real thing' to it. — noAxioms

Yes, there is an issue here. We can, of course construct, imaginary worlds and most of the time we don't bother to point out that they are always derived from the world we live in. As here, we know about real cars that really crash and what happens afterwards (roughly). That's the basis that enables us to construct and recognize simulations of them. "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" are extensions of that ability.

The skull-vat view does not feed the mind a set of artificially generated lies. VR does. — noAxioms

That's a bit unfair, isn't it? We know quite well what is VR and what is not, so it is clearly distinguishable from reality. Nobody pretends otherwise. Of course, we can frighten ourselves with the idea that a VR (In some unimaginably advanced form) could be used to deceive people; "Matrix" is one version of this. But, unless we are straightforward positivists or followers of George Berkeley, the fact that the difference between VR and reality is perfectly clear and the problem is no different from the problem how we tell dreams from reality.

Quite. I'm not pushing for a return to a golden past. It's more along the lines of a forgotten wisdom. — Wayfarer

It's one thing to retrieve the wisdom. It's quite another to one bring back the fool's gold. Effective panning is essential. And then I wonder whether you can have one without the other.

he'd be lionized — Wayfarer

That would explain why he's so hard to understand.

Wittgenstein said in his Lecture on Ethics that, say a man's head turns suddenly into a lion's head. We would all be shocked, suspect a miracle; that is, until science got a hold of it and a discovery, perhaps something completely new, was measured, compared, tested in different environments, etc. And if this were simply not explainable because the results defied the repeatability requirement of science, then this, too, would be admitted and normalized. We would call this "chaos". There are many things called chaos by science. — Astrophel

Thank you very much. I didn't know that Wittgenstein articulated this thought.

The simulation hypothesis has nothing to do with an imitation of a person, which would be an android or some other 'fake' human. — noAxioms

The "simulation hypothesis" is indeed quite different from the hypothesis that there are imitations of people around. I'm not quite sure that it has "nothing to do" with fake people.

What if this is all a simulation and everyone you think is conscious are really NPC's?
— RogueAI
RogueAI is probably not suggesting an imitation person here. — noAxioms

The simulation hypothesis proposes that what humans experience as the world is actually a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which humans themselves are constructs." — noAxioms

On the face of it, this looks like a generalization from "there are some fake. imitation, simulated people around" to "everything is a simulation".
One complication is that we have a forest of similar concepts that work in the same space. Teasing out the differences between an imitation, a fake, a forgery, a pretence, a simulation, etc. would be very complicated. But I think that some general remarks can be made.

It is undoubtedly true that any money in your pocket could be forged. But it does not follow that all money everywhere at all times might be forged. On the contrary, a forgery can only be a forgery if there is such a thing as the real thing.

In all of these cases, there is always a question what is being imitated or forged or whatever. We should never use these words on their own. We should always specify what a simulation or imitation is a simulation of..., which means specifying what a real example is of the thing you are simulating.

Simulating or imitation a reality is simulating everything. So what is it a simulation of? To put it another way, what is the reality that is being simulated? Reality is a totalizing concept and so not an object like a picture or a tree or a planet. "Simulate" does not apply here.

mathematical universe hypothesis, — noAxioms

What empirical evidence could possibly confirm or refute this? I don't see this as a hypothesis at all, but as a methodological decision. In the 17th century, physicists decided to eject anything that seemed incapable of mathematical treatment, so colours and sounds were banished to the mind, placed beyond the scope of science. Science did not need those hypotheses.

simulation is simply an explicit execution of an approximation of those laws, on a closed or open system. — noAxioms

So how does a simulation differ from reality?

They perform for instance simulations of car crashes at the design phase, the result of which eventually generates a design that is safer. — noAxioms

Fair enough. But in those cases, it is clear what the simulation is a simulation of. We know what the real thing is. As you say, this has nothing to do with a simulation of everything.

I'm afraid I don't have the time to respond in detail to what you say about actual simulation and virtual reality. Perhaps later. I'll just say that, so far as I can see, the BIV hypothesis either presupposes the existence of normal reality or describes all of us right now. (The skull is a vat.)

Metaphysics, in that context, is not a dry textbook of scholastic definitions and dogmas, but a grounding vision, a way of being-in-the-world, but one that has been long forgotten, on the whole. — Wayfarer

something goes dreadfully wrong when man reaches for a divided and false certainty, and this was certainly as true for Counter Reformation figures as well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In this context, do we really have a basis for making these judgements? I've no problem with the idea that the Enlightenment is not perfect, and perhaps it has run its course. But when I think about what preceded it, I do not find myself longing to return to the Good Old Days. So we find ourselves trying to work out the Next Thing, avoiding the mistakes of the Last Thing.

But

something goes dreadfully wrong when man reaches for a divided and false certainty — Count Timothy von Icarus

So perhaps we should be very careful, and sceptical of certainties.

When you look for the causes of practices, there is nothing concrete to point to behind them, no essences to inform what it is that rules might be used to point out. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Aren't practices and ways of life ("This is what I do") foundations for Wittgenstein at least? If they are, your question does arise, as it always does for any foundation. For some, it leads us to a change of discourse, to naturalistic ideas about human beings, social animals finding their way through the "real" world. But that seems to be where we came in!

I think it might be more useful to say that there are general principles that are essential to making the scientific method work that are also relevant to statistics, probability theory, perception, Hebbian "fire-together-wire-together" neuronal activity, and how physical information works at a basic level. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do their have to be general principles as such? Should we not change the model and think of something more dynamic, more evolutionary?

I suppose my next question is what is flawless without bugs? Even concepts of the most perfect thing "God," are riddled with bugs. "everything being a quick and dirty fix," I like that for a little comedy routine I've been toying with, it Starts off with "Y'all are some Naaaassty motherfuckas..." Ty for the inspiration. — Vaskane

Well, perhaps, "without bugs" is an ideal, a target that may well not be achievable.

Wittgenstein identifies what could be considered a bug with that idea - that we cannot think in such a world. "Back to the rough ground".

Our brains seem bugged when it comes to communication. Or perhaps it's both language and brain? — Vaskane

Maybe the expectation that either is a coherent system is a mistake. Evolution only requires that the systems work in normal circumstances. So quick and dirty ways of arriving at answers will survive so long as they work for the creature on which they are running.

I sometimes wonder whether "This sentence is false" or "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves" are bugs in logic, or language or in our brains. Or possibly whether they are not bugs in the sense that they need to be fixed - more like "0" and divisibility, we just need a rule to give us (or maybe refuse to give us) the answer.

I also think the phenomena of "wrong" rules is a reminder that rules ultimately are also defined and refined in terms of their purposes, which is easy to recall with games, but harder with natural language and mathematics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Purposes" has to be interpreted liberally here. It will work in some cases, but not in all. For example, I don't think it works very well in the context of a game. (An "exercise" in the context of teaching or training or practising is different.) I prefer to think of the "point" of the rules. The problem with the work-around you identify is that if only some people know about it, it is an unfair advantage, and if everyone knows about it, it make the "stun" feature pointless.

This ends up circular, but not in a bad way. Words have their meanings because of how people use them, but then how people use words ends up being driven (in at least some cases) by what people want/intend them to mean. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This isn't circularity. It's feedback.

Also, video games have the benefit of having canonical rules that are faithfully executed by a computer. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In a sense, that's true. But both the software and hardware are designed and built to produce certain results which are meaningful in the context of human life and practices. So the ultimate foundation that Wittgenstein arrives at "This is what I do" does apply.

Natural language bugs will necessarily be hard to define due to the lack of canonical rules and faithful execution. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I like your example here. As a matter of style, there's a lot to be said for avoiding the passive unless it is unavoidable just because it is vague. It's to be expected that natural language will be messy and complicated, and also that people will find and adopt ways of using it in problematic ways. Although one might argue that ambiguity is often useful or desirable in pragmatic ways. Of course, whether they are desirable or not will depend on your point of view.

The most profound consequence of all of this is that it tells against the approach to language as a complete consistent structure with its own metaphysical existence. That model is not wrong, because we all learn language as a pre-existing practice and it can be useful, for example in logic or linguistics, but it cannot be fully achieved. The view that language is a practice amongst human beings and part of the human way of life is more helpful in many ways.

I'm not a fan of systematic analyses, but perhaps we could distinguish between three different kinds of problem here.
1. One is issues caused when a difficult or anomalous case turns up in the world. The discovery of black swans or of platypuses.
2. Another is the kind of discovery that has been so much evident in mathematics - irrational numbers, etc. The problem of what to do about "0" is perhaps not quite the same, but shares the feature that the standard rule don't apply. But it is the rules themselves (given the standard interpretation of them) that produce the result.
3. A third is where people take advantage of (misuse) the rules to achieve some thing that is not strictly relevant to them. The passive voice is one example, and the "fix" for your bug seems to me to be another.

I'm sorry haven't been able to reply to you, but it seems that the moment has passed and the discussion moved on. In interesting ways

Whatever existence is is bound analytically to the saying it is. — Astrophel

Yes, that's the point that one keeps coming back to - even if one thinks about different ways of using language.

But knowing does not give one the kind of "ontological" intimacy you seem to be suggesting. To knowledge, the world will remain transcendental. There is my cat, that lamp, that fence post over there, and here am I. Nothing is going tp bridge that distance, no matter how one theorizes epistemic relations. I know that they exist, but I don't know what that means. This is because language is pragmatic: in perceptual events I DEAL with the world, and meaning is bound up in this. — Astrophel

This seems to me the right way to approach the problem. Is it too brutal to observe that the description of the cat is not the cat. Why should it be? It would be pointless if it were. But when we are dealing with the cat, interacting with it, it is the cat we are interacting with, and not a description of it. Is describing the cat inter-acting with it? Clearly not in the sense required to state the problem. To accept a sense of interaction that includes description as interaction is to dissolve the problem by definition and will satisfy no-one.

I am using Language as broadly as one can imagine, to include all images, representations, signifiers etc., if there are ceteras, stored in memory/History and structuring what we--philosophers and laity alike--think of as human experience. — ENOAH

It sounds as if Language is a real rag-bag. But I'm guessing that you are relying on the structure of signifier and signified as the common element. But, in this use, it doesn't help the effect of the way you use these concepts to smother differences that seem important to me. Pictures are very different from descriptions, just because they are representations of something; descriptions, in my unorthodox view, and not representations at all; maps and diagrams are half-way houses between the two; signalling flags are a code; they are more like words, but not the same. Words are not all of a piece either; The numeral "1" stands in a very different relationship to its signified from "horse"; "walking" signifies something very different from either - and so on. You may think the differences don't matter. We'll see.
An important point for me is that "language" (and "logic") can seem to be something that exists in its own right, in some way and when we learn it, it does seems so. But though sentences may exist independently of speakers, in the sense that they can be written down, they are, like propositions until they are asserted or denied. The life of language is in its use by speakers and their use is what maintains or modifies it.

I am using History to refer to the collective of these Signifiers operating on the Natural World beyond the individual body, and constructing Narratives beyond individual personalities, all of which moves autonomously in accordance with evolved Laws and Dynamics, is inter-permeable or accessible to Itself in spite of embodiment, is ultimately Fictional, and though it affects Realty via embodiment and the manipulation of resources into Culture, it has no access whatsoever to knowing Reality, despite all of our (Its own) efforts to prove it wrong. — ENOAH

Like language, history is a mixed bag. But that's not my main problem here. My problem is that I simply don't follow what you say and in any case, I'm not at all sure that there are laws of history. Certainly, since it normally takes the form of a narrative, which does not present us with any laws, the idea must be problematic. But the biggest issue is that much history is about people. You seem to regard it as an independent actor. It's as if you were telling me about the army going to war, rather than people going to war.

Both these responses to you are well summarized by Astrophel when he says:

It's Kierkegaard who complained that Hegel had "forgotten that we exist." — Astrophel

However, the opening your paragraph - "I am using History to refer to the collective of these Signifiers operating on the Natural World beyond the individual body, and constructing Narratives beyond individual personalities," is very promising. But then you conclude with "it has no access whatsoever to knowing Reality, despite all of our (Its own) efforts to prove it wrong." Either you mean by "reality" what you mean by "natural world" or you don't. If you do mean the same, you are contradicting yourself; if you don't, I have no idea what you mean.

If its Reality you want, just breathe. — ENOAH

This is a jewel. I know I could argue that if I obediently breathe, language has put me in touch with reality. But you remind me of the Zen masters who will reply to questions like "what is reality?" by offering you a cup of tea. Perhaps we should share one and stop worrying so much. Or am I misunderstanding you?

All we can say regarding the Truth of this hypothetical in Reality is the Organism seeing. It is in the Organism do-ing, be-iing, see-ing , is-ing, all of which "exists" in presence, in is-ing/be-ing, which is True. — ENOAH

I can just about get my head around this. But you said earlier:-

But with the advent of uniquely human Consciousness or Mind, "seeing" is immediately displaced by "perceiving." That is, it is displaced by the Signifiers re-constructing the sensation with its Narrative. — ENOAH

I don't see why you can't count perceiving as just one of the activities of human beings. Good, bad or indifferent as signifiers may be, they are also real and part of reality.
The key point to grasp, I think, is this. Language is part of the world. The world was there first and language developed in it. It is as real and natural as anything else in the world.

I am not necessarily using any philosophical dialectic, — ENOAH

When I wrote "dialect", I did not mean "dialectic". But maybe you are pointing to the same issue - mutual comprehension. There's only one philosophy that seriously tried not to use specialized philosophical dialect/language/dialectic - "ordinary language philosophy" - and that didn't end well. (I say that it turned out that ordinary language was just another speciality.) I think we have to look at some sort of translation between philosophies if there is to be any kind of dialogue. You are clearly succeeding in that, because I at least have the impression that I can partly understand what you are saying.

This was an over simplification. But, alas, oversimplifying, I find, is unavoidable in a forum like this. — ENOAH

Everything is an over-simplification. There's no final statement of a philosophical doctrine. What matters is relevance to the matter at hand. I need to think over what you say, but I will respond - as briefly as I can.

Your question 'how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible' follows from the assumption that you never see the lamp, only something prior to the seeing, in your own seeing. — jkop

It is worse than that. If you know that you never see the lamp, you must know what it would be like to see the lamp. That means it is possible to see the lamp (under some circumstances). This "assumption" involves changing the meaning of "see". But the idea that hallucinating that you see a lamp (etc.) assumes that "hallucinating" is like seeing, but different. So even the conclusion that when we think we see a lamp we are hallucinating see the lamp, still assumes that it is possible to see the lamp.

That something is, is found in a proposition. Quantification or domain of discourse. — Banno

Surely, more accurately, that something is, is found in a true proposition (but not in a false one). But I would agree that a (meaningful) domain of discourse includes criteria for distinguishing between truth and falsity. But discourse is not, as formal logic is supposed to be, a structure fixed for all circumstances - the rules can break down, but they can be revised. That seems to me to address, at least partly, the fundamental concerns here.

Isn't that exactly what eventually but (almost?) inevitably happens when there are gaps in the Language structures. — ENOAH

In one way, I agree with you. However, I have great difficulty in understanding the philosophical dialect you are speaking after that. One problem (which does not occur here) is that I suspect that the term "language" is often taken to mean a single structure; that is reinforced when you give it a capital letter "Language". I don't think language has a single, overall, structure. (I wonder if Platonism is not the back of that idea.) Wittgenstein compares language to an ancient city with many overlapping and interacting structures, and that seems more helpful to me.
I don't think that "gap" is a helpful metaphor to describe the places where development happens - though it may be useful in some cases. In others "fault" or "extended (stretched) application" is better. I have a similar problem with "History". But we seem to be agreed that the possibility of novelty is inherent in language. It is not a closed system (a grid). On the contrary, we respond to challenges, difficulties, inadequacies to a linguistic structure in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes we adapt, sometimes we invent, sometimes we just forget. (And yes, no language is an abstract structure, though it is convenient to think of it that way. But in the end (or rather, in the beginning) it is inescapably realized in how human beings live their lives in the world.

We dont use a concept to establish a world without concepts, we find ourselves thrown into a world ( we ‘are’ a self by continually transcending toward the world) and speak from amidst the beings ( things, concepts, uses) that are actualized from out of that world which projects itself — Joshs

There is an idea that I like in this, if I've understood it. It is the idea that we need to start with the world, rather than with language. Then we can see language as part of the world and as developing within it. So the question is not, "how does language reach the world?" but rather "how does language develop within the world?". Whether it involves transcendence or not, the starting-point must be our lives as actual physical human beings.

That’s right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility. — Joshs

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If it is within those boundaries, it is new in an old sense, already catered for. The points where the boundaries break down or are transcended is where the world might be said to show itself. There is another, surprising, possibility. The rules of language may themselves lead to incomprehensible conclusions; irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, calculus &c. These are places when we don't know what to say. We may be driven to develop new ways to speak, or stretch the boundaries by means of metaphors or poetry or pictures - even, possibly, music and dancing.

The statement on the left is about language. The statement on the right is about how things are. T-sentences show that truth concerns how language links to how things are. — Banno

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the T-sentences resolve the problem or not. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein asking himself how he can possibly use language to get beyond language. Isn't that where he starts talking about saying and showing?

If your statement belongs to a certain language game, then the game is always already in play the moment recognition of the state of affairs comes about. And what are facts if not IN the game? Or ON the grid of language possibilities? None of these establishes a knowledge that can allow the world to be posited in this stand alone way. — Astrophel

So perhaps the project of positing the world in a stand-alone way is a mistake?

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the -world determines that language and world are precisely not at a distance from each other. On the contrary, language discloses self and world together, as our always already being thrown into worldly possibilities. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein make related points. The distance is not between language and the world, it is between our self and our self, due to the fact that, through language, we always come to ourselves from the world. — Joshs

So there is a concept that resolves the problem how to establish a world without concepts?

A good paradox tempts us to find a resolution, but ensures that no solution can be found. This is a good paradox. The paradox is formulated in language. So it is itself included in the problem. So "language in itself" transcends our concept of language, the "world in itself" transcends our concept of the world and the relationship or link between the two will always transcend anything we can articulate in language.

Unless that link shows itself in our embodied existence in the world, that is, in human life and practices.

So truth is a monadic predicate, while belief is dyadic. — Banno

I see why belief is dyadic. But I don't see that truth is monadic. Surely truth has an (often suppressed) object - "true of" or "true to". A true right angle looks monadic, but is not typical.

This superficial structure serves to show that a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. ....... It might be misleading as the proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. — Banno

These two sentences look contradictory to me.

.... a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. — Banno

But I agree with this.

It's very hard to give an account of knowledge that transcends the nature/mind, subjective/objective divide. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why do we want to?

I think you get at a confusion that comes up with correspondence definitions of truth. We say a belief is true if it corresponds to reality. No problem here, beliefs can be true or false - same for statements. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm afraid there is a big problem. What "correspond" means is completely unclear. Consequently, this theory - paradoxically - is the basis of some very strange ideas, such as the idea that reality is, in some mysterious way, beyond our ken.

Forward looking toward anticipated results, and this is an event of recognition that is localized in the perceiving agency, you or me. The object over there, the cow, "outside" of this is entirely transcendental because outside in this context means removed from the anticipatory temporality of the event. — Astrophel

Thanks for the explanation. I understand from what you say that the cow that I recognize exists independently of my recognition of it. Less exciting than I hoped.

I cannot see how anything else in the universe can be conscious apart from humans, and some of the mammals (having lesser consciousness due to their lack of language uses). — Corvus

Well, it is certainly true that the only kinds of beings that are conscious in our universe are humans and animals. Humans are our paradigm of a conscious being. Consciousness in animals is more complicated, partly because different animals are have different levels of consciousness and partly because there are different opinions about how conscious they are. Whether it is possible that there are conscious beings apart from these is another question. There's no doubt that it is possible to imagine that there are and the future no doubt holds many things that we do not yet know. So I think your claim is over-confident.

I still believe that everyone (with common sense) knows / agrees that consciousness emerges from the brain. — Corvus

It used to be common sense that the earth is flat and that there is no land between Europe and China.
"Everyone knows that p" is one statement and "Someone does not know that p" is incompatible with it. "Everyone with common sense knows that p" is a different statement and "Someone does not know that p" is compatible with it.

It is not the main point of the OP worthy to quibble about, because the OP is not a High-Order Logic topic — Corvus

I put my point badly. I only wanted to say that dualists might find it somewhat problematic to say that the brain generates the mind - even if you expand it to the body creates the mind. Dualism may be less popular than it was, but it still has philosophical adherents. I have to acknowledge that fact even though I think they are mistaken.

That is the hard problem of mind-body issue. No one seems to know. The biologists and neurologists were suppose to find about it. — Corvus

It may be that they need to relax and concentrate on how the system works. If you ask what part of the central heating system keeps the house warm, you'll find yourself endlessly searching. If you ask where the self is that moves the car, you may discard some parts, but you'll never narrow it down to one part.

"S knows P iff S believes P, is justified in believing P and P is true" — Astrophel

This is a much contested theory. But what's the alternative? A logician can simply decide that "know" is primitive; but that's just abandoning the idea of defining it.

And so I see that "P is true" entails the existence of P in an way that is supposed to be independent of justification which is an altogether nonsensical assumption. Can't be done. And this is because existence is part and parcel of justification itself. — Astrophel

I take the point in the first sentence. I don't really understand the last sentence. Do you mean that only true statements can act as justification (where "p is false" is true iff p is false).
The hidden additional necessary justification for claiming that S knows that P is that S is competent to assess whether P - and being competent to assess whether P is not just a matter of knowing that certain propositions are true.
This is focuses on first-hand knowledge. But a great deal, even most, of what we know is known at second-hand. Yet first-hand knowledge needs to be the basis of second-hand knowledge. One could insist that only first-hand knowledge counts as knowledge, but that seems unduly strict, unless you are happy to develop a specialized philosophical dialect. This needs a good deal of disentangling.

Discoveries are events of constructing a truth. — Astrophel

Discovering something is revealing it, and makes perfect sense when applied to truths. One would need to explain what "constructing a truth" in a good more detail for it to make sense.

The "is true" in the JTB account simple rules out knowing things that are not true. It is distinct from the justification. — Banno

It seems to me rather like a ceteris paribus clause, requiring us to withdraw our claim to know that p if it turns out that p is false.
But it does have an important additional consequence. It means that I cannot pass on something that I have learnt from someone else without endorsing it. This makes knowledge quite different from belief.
In logic, we can simpy stipulate a definition, which means that someone else can stipulate a different definition and there is no basis for argument.
So I like to argue that "fallible knowledge" undermines the place of knowledge in the language-game. It becomes a fancy variety of belief. But it is useful to distinguish between what is established as true and what may be true, but is not fully established. The latter is the role of belief. (But I don't mean to apply some impossible-to-attain standard of proof here. We can always withdraw our claims if we need to.)

But having said that, there is indeed a close relation between epistemology and ontology. Statements being true or false is indeed dependent on what there is in the world. — Banno

Yes, that's true. And, as your articulation of the point demonstrates, the possibility is built in to our language. Our language allows us - even requires us - to distinguish between language and the world,

It seems pretty clear that conditions in the world are really impossible to speak of outside of the grid of logic and language. — Astrophel

That's true. But the grid of language (including logic and mathematics) does allow us to speak of conditions in the world. Truth would not be possible if it didn't. It is true that sometimes we need to develop or change the concepts that we apply to the world, and that seems difficult if you think of language as a grid - i.e. fixed and limited. But language is a hugely complex system which can be developed and changed - as is logic (as opposed to individual logical systems).

quote="Astrophel;886488"]The idea of a transcendental object is the best we can do when we leave the logical grid and try to talk about things.[/quote]
Can you explain this idea in a bit more detail? I don't quite get it.