LLM's require going through a lot of complex inner states in order to engage in language use. — wonderer1

My 2 cents -- and @Hanover may see it differently -- is that by putting it this way, we're succumbing to the illusion that "an LLM" could have any states at all. The computer on which it runs could, I suppose, but I don't think that's what you mean.

Having said that, I should also say that I'm not very familiar with how computer programmers talk about their work. Is "inner state" a common term? If so, do you know what they're meaning to designate? Could there be a distinction between inner and outer, speaking strictly about the program?

I see the cat on the mat! — MoK

No, that's just my avatar. :wink:

What this means to me is that the ability to engage in langauge games does not require an inner state. What this does not mean is that we can ignore what the conscious state is or that langauge does not provide us a means for that conversation. — Hanover

Good. Just out of curiosity, has it been shown that an AI program can pass the Turing Test? The examples of bot-talk that I've seen cited in TPF wouldn't fool me for a minute, but maybe there are better ones. And it does depend, as you say, on whether we should see the Turing Test as a standard for whether we can be fooled (I'm saying we can't, yet) or as a standard for revealing "no inconsistent behavioral manifestations." Thus, the program might perform perfectly in that regard, but when paired anonymously with a human who answers the same questions, it might nonetheless fail the "fool me" test. Leading to the intriguing question: why? Does a human exhibit more than consistent question-answering behavior, even in a test designed for question-and-answer?

A photograph is a copy of what exists in the world, and therefore depicts what is necessarily true. — RussellA

At one point, that was accurate. But the technology rapidly advanced so that what is now presented in a photograph is as open to question as what a painter paints.

There is no programmer out there, for example, that went through and intentionally answered whatever question you might pose to ChatGPT. — Hanover

I see your point. It's a tough nut. Do we need to try to find some limit cases where we could speak of a programmer "intentionally" doing something via a program? And do we agree that the idea of a program doing anything intentionally is a non-starter? (just leaving Davidson out of all this for the time being)

Notice, BTW, that I'm trying to push back against what I'm calling the "impersonation" by speaking only of "the program" and not personifying it with a name such as ChatGPT, or implying that one could pose a question to such an entity. This is part of the very clever way that the programmers encourage the illusion that the program could have intentions or express meanings, etc. And I'm not saying this is nefarious in some way -- creating this illusion is vital if we're going to get along in cyberworld, where icons stand in for 0s and 1s, etc. But it needs to be resisted in philosophical examination of the kind of questions posed here.

That was a spellcheck error where it somehow put "not" instead of "more." You charitably read me as rational and deciphered my intent correctly. Very Davidsonian of you. — Hanover

Brilliant.

This does not mean that we look into the heads of the speakers to decipher intent, but we have to ascribe it to the person based upon our assumption that they are rational and logical. "Ascribe" is the operative word, where we assume it and place it upon the speaker, but we don't pretend to know specifically what the intent is, but we do know there is an intent, but it's a black box. — Hanover

Yes, this is all fine, though "black box" might be overemphasizing the inscrutability.

That's why the Chatbot example seems relevant. We do not have to "ascribe intention to the [person] program based upon our assumption that they are rational and logical." Such a (false) assumption is the "impersonation" I'm instead ascribing to the programmer. This seems right in line with Davidson, because even by ascribing no intention to the program, we're able to explain the meaningfulness of its outputs by deferring that ascription back to the programmer -- again, without needing to be able to say specifically what these intentions are.

Is this analogy too simple?: It's like holding up a puppet and pretending it's "talking" and "having intentions." Every child knows this only a game, an impersonation.

we don't much need the bit about inferring some intent on the part of the speaker. We can do so, but it's not needed. Meaning here is not the intent of the speaker. Speaker meaning is something else.

That'll cause some folk no end of confusion. It shouldn't. It does not imply that the speaker does not have an intent. — Banno

Nor does it imply that there aren't cases where speaker intent is very important. I think the Chatbot example is such a case. The program itself can't be said to have intentions, thought the sentences it produces have meaning. But the intention of its programmers, as best we know, is to impersonate intention on the part of the program. This of course takes "intention" to a different level, but that's my point.

Ready Made and Found Art were a provocative objection by its creators to what "ART" was supposed to look like and mean. "If I say it is art, then it is art." They said. — BC

More defensible is, "If we say it is art, then it is art," which can also open up interesting conversations about who is included in "we."

"What art is supposed to look like" and "what art is supposed to mean" are separate inquiries, I think, both prompted by an object like Duchamp's urinal. D's choice of the urinal as his "ready-made" was of course not arbitrary; he offers an object that is "supposed to" look like something unbeautiful, utilitarian, with connotations of disgust -- the sort of thing our culture encourages us not to look at. So, can we declare it to be art nonetheless?

The "what does it mean" question is the more lasting, and exciting. Here, any object would do, and the question applies as much to found art as to ready-mades. What does it mean, what are we saying, when we declare something to be art? Are we discovering something within that object? Or are we declaring a way of seeing, a way of regarding? I think art should be understood as something we put a metaphorical frame around, and 20th century art has shown us that that can be literally anything. The title of Danto's famous book suggests this eloquently: The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

Conceptual art pushes this even further, asking whether an "object" is even needed to reside within the frame.

The story we tell about the painting is different to the story we tell about the wall — Banno

something being art is dependent on how we chose to talk about it. — Banno

the "circumstances" that reveal art are exactly that -- circumstances, understandings, things we ourselves have to put in place, — J

We're all saying the same thing here. So the interesting question is, What are those stories? What are those circumstances? How do they vary from era to era, culture to culture?

What makes a painting a painting? Is it that it's done with paint? — Moliere

I'm going to say Yes, but the next question is, "What makes a painting art?" As you say, why isn't a "painting" that covers my walls with white paint, art? Or could it be, ever?

circumstances that are not exactly artistic — Moliere

So what are these circumstances that are artistic? Should we bring in Danto at this point? He asks a similar question: Is it some feature or quality of the art object that tells us it is art?

What is it that makes a painting appear as a painting? — Moliere

That is, as something that fall under the rubric "art" as opposed to "wallpainting". A couple of possibilities:

1) Yes, it's something about the painted thing itself that reveals it to be art.

2) No, the "circumstances" that reveal art are exactly that -- circumstances, understandings, things we ourselves have to put in place, as opposed to discover within the object itself.

The object itself has, traditionally, been seen as offering us the necessary information, making (1) seem plausible, but after the developments of the 20th century, that's no longer an option. Or so Danto, and I, would say.

Again, your responses are thoughtful, on point, and help develop the questions of the OP. Much appreciated.

There is no fact that ensures those discussions even will be resolved, but that doesn’t annihilate the ability or process to do so, nor make it a matter of individual “opinion” (or a sociological matter). — Antony Nickles

Right. And we have to hold out against those who see this as a binary -- either we get a resolution or it's just a matter of opinion and/or "how people do."

I would think agreement on the criteria for what constitutes good (even “correct”) scientific method would be easier. — Antony Nickles

Easier than similar criteria for philosophy, anyway. Though I'm alive to the fact that there's a lot of soul-searching going on in the scientific community these days, or maybe it's just the philosophy-of-science community.

my concern has only been that dictating that a conception be “absolute” forces what constitutes “local” in comparison. And again, I think we are smooshing together “absolute” as a criteria and “absolute” as all-encompassing (“unified”). — Antony Nickles

Agreed. The criteriological usage is perhaps closer to Descartes, for what that's worth? -- criteria for certainty = knowledge that cannot be doubted or shown to be false, hence "absolute" knowledge. Looking at the other usage, I'm not sure whether an Absolute Conception that unifies and explains all knowledge would also need to demonstrate itself to be certain. And that's part of Williams' question -- does such a conception have to know that it is correct? He calls that "going too far."

We have a conflict of interest, however, because our conception wants to avoid the possibility of doubt, or maybe include every outcome. So in saving some of the world (or gaining a complete picture of it), we relegate the rest to “error” or "local predispositions". — Antony Nickles

Well, Williams concludes, "The most ambitious ideas that have been entertained of the absolute conception must fail," and this is part of why. I'd only add that I think "error" in Williams' sense, and "local predispositions," are distinct, though equally troubling, categories. From the absolute viewpoint, are all local predispositions errors? Not exactly. They are incomplete, and perhaps dependent on a framework that can't be made part of an absolute conception. But this isn't the sort of "error" that Williams believes an Absolute Conception needs a theory to explain. That error would be the one that claims to be "a rival view" to the Absolute Conception itself.

a moral disagreement is different than an aesthetic one or a scientific dispute. Kant might call the differences categorical, in what makes a thing imperative (to itself). — Antony Nickles

OK. When you wrote:

Judging a good shoe and what is considered a planet are different in kind, — Antony Nickles

I thought you might be thinking that the shoe question could not be settled objectively, whereas the planet question could. But I should have considered your choice of "planet" more carefully, since that's a recent example of a supposedly scientific question that turned on a matter of terminology. So -- objective as to language, in a way, but not as to heavenly bodies!

As Wittgenstein puts it, we see the same color to the extent we agree to call it that. This may or may not dovetail into seeing philosophy as a set of descriptions, rather than answers. — Antony Nickles

Or as any other particular thing, including "therapy" for misuses of language. Do you think there's a way to characterize what most of us call philosophy -- that is, the sort of conversation we're having here -- in Wittgensteinian terms that give it a use rather than a misuse? In a funny way, that's an "absolute conception" question too, though not Williams'.

In this, Nagel approaches something like a dialectic: not a fusion of subjective and objective, but a dialogical relationship between them. — Wayfarer

This is good. I think we forget, because the phrase is now part of the atmosphere, that "The View from Nowhere" was undoubtedly intended to sound absurd, to provoke the response, "Wait a minute, how could there be any such thing?" (Possibly a partial reason why Nagel chose it over "view from anywhere"?) Many who haven't read the book think Nagel uncritically espouses such a view. Rather, he's asking how it is that the philosophical desire for rationality and universalizability seems to pull us toward an impossible point of view, one that in addition abandons what it means to live a life -- that is, subjectivity. And yet we can't just ignore what appear to be the claims of rationality either. So -- yes, a dialectic.

:party: At the risk of jeopardizing our accord, I do need to clarify that I'm using "analysis" to mean something like conceptual analysis and its logical paraphernalia. To "lie beyond analysis" in this sense doesn't relieve us of the responsibility of making sense. I don't think Nagel or anyone else should try to discuss topics which can't meaningfully be talked about at all -- not within philosophy, anyway.

So… that’s it then. — Fire Ologist

Nah, just had to return to real life for a while. But I wanted to be sure to acknowledge my mistake first.

Isn’t this thread about more precision, so “doesn’t primarily concern” doesn’t seem rigorous and begs further details about what is the primary concern and how secondary or tertiary is the less concerning. — Fire Ologist

Precision is a focus here, for sure. But not at the cost of accuracy. I'm suggesting that it's more accurate to talk about a type of philosophy -- Nagel's, perhaps -- which avails itself when necessary of all the rigorous, analytic tools, but is aiming to discuss topics that lie beyond analysis as such. To try to carve this up into primary, secondary, and tertiary seems hopeless, but maybe you can give an example of what that might look like? I may not be picturing what you mean.

I think this contradicts you saying “though it need not.” — Fire Ologist

I don't see it. Can you elaborate?

This isn’t an argument. It’s just why I bother to seek something valuable by talking with other people. — Fire Ologist

Fair enough. As long as you agree it isn't an argument. There are about a bazillion arguments out there about how soundness and validity connect, if you want to chase them down. Maybe start with correspondence theories of truth?

You changed “relegated” to “devoted”. — Fire Ologist

You're absolutely right, I did, as in "devote itself to" -- a slightly different meaning, but my apologies for not remembering.

I think the Williamson essay is itself a good example, though I suppose some would dispute its rigor.

Or for a broader example, Thomas Nagel's work is my ideal of how philosophy can be remain rigorous and also ask questions that go beyond clarifying what is consistent or coherent within a given model. There are certainly others.

One thing to notice: The requirement to "completely forego the devotion to . . . " is surely too rigid, and also tendentious. By putting it in terms of "devotion," you're already building a rhetorical case against it, aren't you? Couldn't we just talk about "a type of philosophy that doesn't primarily concern itself with . . ." ?

Williams’ approach . . . — Joshs

Out of curiosity, what do you take Williams' position to be on the question of the Absolute Conception? Could you set it out in Williams' terms, rather than indicate how other philosophers might derogate it?

So now I ask you, must may the best good philosophy relegate devote itself to identifying and clarifying consistent/inconsistent and coherent/incoherent relations internal to systems/models? — Fire Ologist

Yes. Though it needn't.

Or is there more to it that can still be rigorous and ought to can be the work of philosophers? — Fire Ologist

Yes.

Well, I was thinking of some of the more extreme premises of the reductionist model. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course you were. This is the dark, problematic side of scientism. I don't know how we'd settle the question of whose "intuitiveness" we're talking about here, yours or mine or some Average Jill's, if there really is such a person. I'm only saying I think it likely that, until these knotty questions are posed, it remains something like "intuitively true" for most Westerners that the sunny Popular-Mechanics view of science is just fine, and deeply reflective of how the world actually operates.

OK. A little off-topic. I don't think anyone's talking about "an inner process of solipsistic self-confirmation." What confirmation may be available is being discussed in terms of shared practices and interpretations.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was saying the opposite: Self-reflexivity is virtually definitive of philosophy. I was contrasting this with what I took @Antony Nickles to be saying -- that there is no difference between the problem situation of reflecting philosophically about, for instance, science, and reflecting philosophically about philosophy.

I would question the exact way in which this is "mainstream." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, so would I, but I'm also doubtful about the corrective narrative you offer. I'm not sure what domain you're quantifying over :smile: , and who the actors in this drama are. This would be an example:

First, the model isn't intuitive. It makes explaining the most obvious facets of our experience of the world impossible, dismissing most of human experience as in some way "illusory," and leaves all sorts of phenomena, particularly life and consciousness (quite important areas) as irresolvable mysteries. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Our" experience? This only applies to people who think philosophically or critically about it. I'd contend that, for most Western adults with an average education, the scientific model is totally intuitive: There's the world out there; scientific method teaches us truths about that world, and shows us how the world works; we can use it predict things and build things; it's been unbelievably successful at doing this, and improving human life. It makes "explaining the most obvious facets of our experience of the world" -- the astonishing order and regularities we discover around us -- possible. What's the problem?!

We on TPF can name some problems, but they simply don't surface unless you stop and think, "Well, what about consciousness? What about values? What about numbers? What about God?" etc. etc. But these questions -- and the move that links them with questions about science -- are not intuitive at all, unless you have a philosophical (or possibly a religious) bent.

This may just be a disagreement about what "intuitive" ought to mean, but all I can say is, given the way I was educated about science in public schools, I'd say my characterization of science, above, is second nature to me, and to most of my peers. It "makes sense": Got a question? Perform a controlled experiment; get the answer. This isn't right, of course, but we're talking about what seems intuitively true, based on education and culture.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. — TLP 6.41–6.522

Your entire quote from the Tractatus is very apropos to the question of an Absolute Conception. We could make this substitution:

"In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no Absolute Conception—and if there were, it could not be absolutely true."

What I'm getting at is that the View from Nowhere puts some very peculiar demands on us as denizens of "the world." If "all happening and being-so is accidental," nothing we say in philosophy can escape this. It's all "local," in Williams' terms. "What makes it non-accidental [that is, what makes the Absolute Conception absolute, or unconditioned] cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental." So, how could we meet this demand?

And yet philosophy (in its reflective capacity) can’t help but trace the contours of what it cannot fully name — whether it’s called the unconditioned, the transcendental, the One, or the Ground. Not a thing, but not nothing. — Wayfarer

Yes, something like this. Do you think "trace the contours of what it cannot fully name" is the situation Williams is describing when he points out that "to ask not just that we should know, but that we should know that we know" is asking too much?

his 'that of which we cannot speak' is not the 'taboo on metaphysics' that the Vienna Circle took it to be - as Wittgenstein himself said:

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.
— 6522 — Wayfarer

Yes.

I don't know what can be said about consciousness in regards to any hypothesis. They are either right or wrong. No? — Patterner

Yes, but other hypotheses allow a basis for discussion about how you'd tell.

But I'm not saying everything is consciousness. I'm saying everything is consciousness. — Patterner

Typing mistake here, I assume? Or else you're getting super woo-woo. :smile:

Philosophy is describing the workings of practices in which we already share interests (in the practice; thus their normativity) so it’s just a matter of agreeing on the explication of the criteria. — Antony Nickles

"Just" a matter of agreeing! Would that it were so simple. I'm not holding out for some radical relativism that would make sensible conversation about this impossible. I'm only pointing out that, within any practice that is deeper and more complicated than, for instance, "what constitutes a correct and sufficient apology or excuse," there is likely going to be debate about framework and criteria that is difficult to resolve. You go on to add "(or scientific study)" to the example about apologies and excuses, but do you really think this is in the same ballpark? Apologies may be seen to be largely conventional, and the prospects for agreement are bright, but is this true of scientific practice? I don't think so.

To say you can speak intelligibly and have reasons doesn’t mean you can say anything you want (intelligibly) in claiming, say, how an apology works (or how knowing does). Again, we might not end up agreeing, nor circumscribe every case or condition, but it’s not as if anything goes. — Antony Nickles

Right. But the things that do go, will keep the discussion about normativity alive.

people who throw cabers — Antony Nickles

Is that like stirring the possum? :smile:

[Specific criteria] hardly transcends the local interpretative predispositions of various cultural communities on earth, — Williams, 302-3

I don't think "[specific criteria]" will do as a substitute for my "[A philosophy which doesn't claim to speak from an Absolute Conception]". Williams is talking about an entire (non-absolute) philosophical framework, not criteria for a practice. His point is that you don't even get to practices without certain understandings about basic background stuff. These understandings, on this way of seeing it, are "local predispositions" because we've stipulated that the philosophical framework is non-absolute. And let's not forget that all this is being set up by Williams in order to question it -- to ask what is at stake by setting up the local/Absolute binary in this way.

If we insist on removing a topic from its context and specific criteria, then we lose the ability to judge a thing based on its own standards.
— Antony Nickles

Agreed, but why would speaking from an absolute conception have to involve this kind of removal? Wouldn't a genuine View from Nowhere provide, along with many other things, an account of those standards, and why they can serve as a basis for judgment? — J

I just did “account for those standards, and why they can serve as a basis for judgment.” — Antony Nickles

Yes. The point is that the Absolute Conception can do that too. It doesn't need to remove a topic from its context.

We can’t with one hand give that there are a multitude of criteria and with the other require that the judgment of each thing requires the same “basis”. It depends on the thing whether the judgment is “absolute” or not. — Antony Nickles

Here you're raising a good question about what "absolute conception" really means. What's the cash value? If we were to discover such a conception, would it mean that all those alleged possible criteria get reduced to some common denominator, conceptually? Is that the "basis" upon which the absolute conception itself rests? I don't know. For Williams' purposes -- and, he suggests, for Descartes' -- an absolute conception would allow us to make sense of, to explain in a unified way, "local" things like secondary qualities, social practices, and disagreements within philosophy. Here's another quote that may help:

[The absolute conception] should be able to overcome relativism in our view of reality through having a view of the world (or at least the coherent conception of such a view) which contains a theory of error: which can explain the existence of rival views, and of itself. — Williams, 301

Judging a good shoe and what is considered a planet are different in kind, not hierarchy, or scope. — Antony Nickles

Say more about this? What is the difference in kind that you see?

But how philosophy is done, and what even counts as philosophy, is always an internal struggle of the discipline — Antony Nickles

Well, yes, that's how I see it, but can you reconcile such a view with what you're saying about "agreeing on the explication of criteria"? When philosophy takes itself as its subject, I believe it enters a unique discourse. Philosophy may talk about science by looking at scientific criteria; the assumption is that philosophy's criteria for how to do this are not on the table. But when the inquiry turns inward, we don't have the luxury of bumping any questions of judgment or method to some off-the-table level.

This is the benefit of looking at the tradition as a set of texts, and not necessarily a set of problems. — Antony Nickles

Interesting. Can you elaborate?

I wonder, then, why you want to say this. It pretty much forecloses discussion.
— J
It doesn't foreclose discussion about the idea that consciousness is fundamental, and that it is simple, undifferentiated experience. — Patterner

But what can now be said about it? It's either true or it isn't, and we don't have any way of evaluating which. Moreover, if everything is consciousness, we can't talk about what it might be like if some thing(s) were not. The position prevents us from being able to specify an alternative.

The idea is that there is no non-consciousness. Everything is experiencing. — Patterner

Compare:

"The idea is that there is no non-matter. Everything is material."

The interesting thing about both these positions is that they can't be argued either for or against. They both involve an interpretation or construal of their key term -- "consciousness" and "matter" -- in such a way as to mean "everything there is." So all one can reply is, "OK, that's what you mean," but it's hard to know where to go from there. I guess one can say, "Almost nobody else means that," but that's not an argument, it's an expostulation.

I wonder, then, why you want to say this. It pretty much forecloses discussion.

OK, sorry I missed your response to sushi.

For those who want to argue the premise, I won't be participating. — Patterner

I just want to understand it, before contributing anything. Mainly the use of "experience." You write:

A rock experiences being a rock . . . A human experiences being a human. — Patterner

Does a dead human experience being a dead human? Can you sketch what that would mean?

It seems we are taking abstraction from context or an individual (or human fallibility, limitation) as the criteria for “certainty”. I’m trying to point out how forced this is by differentiating topics and claiming that their individual criteria and their appropriate contexts are necessary and sufficient for being accepted (that we can all assert intelligible and rational claims about their “framework”). — Antony Nickles

The "we" here is understood as referring to those within Williams' hypothesis -- the proponents of the "absolute conception" who might be understood as claiming that such a conception would provide certainty. I, and I think Williams, would agree that this is forced, or at least unnecessary. There remains, though, the question of whether "being accepted" is the right way to look at it. The problem is that while "we all" can indeed make intelligible and rational claims in support of a given framework, another group of "us all" can dispute them, with equal rationality.

That this does not ensure agreement is philosophy’s (and morality’s) lack of power — Antony Nickles

How are you understanding "power" here?

If we insist on removing a topic from its context and specific criteria, then we lose the ability to judge a thing based on its own standards. — Antony Nickles

Agreed, but why would speaking from an absolute conception have to involve this kind of removal? Wouldn't a genuine View from Nowhere provide, along with many other things, an account of those standards, and why they can serve as a basis for judgment? What would be questioned, from this view, would be the absolute nature of such judgment -- only the Absolute Conception gets to say absolute things.

Is it the same sort of discourse that allows phil to speak about a discipline outside itself, such as science?
— J

Yes. Philosophy is the unearthing of the criteria for a practice, such as why we value, and how we judge, science. The philosophical assessment of science is not based on science’s own criteria. — Antony Nickles

Right, but that wasn't quite my question. The philosophical assessment of philosophy is presumably based on philosophy's own criteria. You don't see a problem there?

This is not “local”, so much as, specific. Not based on the individual, but the particular (criteria and context of a practice). — Antony Nickles

An important question. I looked back at Williams to clarify how he was using "local":

[A philosophy which doesn't claim to speak from an Absolute Conception] hardly transcends the local interpretative predispositions of various cultural communities on earth, [so] there is not much reason to think it could transcend the peculiarities of humanity as a whole. . . . Descartes' aspiration [was] for an absolute conception which abstracts from local or distorted representations of the world. — Williams, 302-3

So I'm pretty sure Williams means what you mean by "specific to a context of a practice." Such a context would require the "interpretative predispositions" Williams speaks of. But he's obviously uncomfortable with leaving it at that. Notice how he pairs "local" with "distorted". Again, I don't know to what extent Williams shares this view; I read him as trying to make the best case he can for why we ought to be concerned with this question, in much the way Descartes was. He would change your statement, "Abstraction makes philosophy impossible," to a question: "Does abstraction (of the V-from-N sort) make philosophy impossible? Why have so many philosophers, beginning with Descartes, tried to locate genuine philosophy within an Absolute Conception?"

Which brings us full circle around to Williams' "move" that I quoted and discussed in the OP. I think this is his way of dissolving the problem.

You could say this is a “thin end of the wedge” strategy. — Wayfarer

I figured this was your method. No reason an OP has to cover the entire ground all at once. It's only worth pointing out that, when "purpose" or "meaning" are cast in specifically human terms, a whole new set of concerns emerge.

the idea that human beings are, in some sense, the universe becoming conscious of itself . . . Now, that doesn’t amount to a fully formed metaphysics, but it at least opens a way of thinking that challenges the view of humanity as a cosmic fluke—an accidental intelligence adrift in a meaningless expanse. — Wayfarer

It probably is helpful to have some "sample metaphysics" that would suggest other ways of looking at this question, and I'm quite taken with the semi-Hegelian idea of a self-conscious universe. But I think the "cosmic fluke" view can be challenged without this, and on much simpler grounds. We're talking about degrees of likelihood based on ludicrously incomplete evidence. People who want to settle this one way or the other seem to assume that human inquiry, especially science, has reached an endpoint from which we can now pronounce on these questions. Why in the world would anyone think that? Is humanity a pointless fluke? Check back with us in a thousand years -- we may know more about it then! And if the retort is "But science can't talk about what has a 'point'," same answer: We'll see! At the moment our understanding of these questions is on the level of little children pottering around in the kindergarten.

Which is why I argue that h.sapiens transcends purely biological determination. Hence, philosophy! — Wayfarer

Well, I agree, but I didn't see you arguing for that. I thought you were contending that any sort of biological purposiveness was good enough to answer the question, "Does existence have a purpose?" -- "whether life, the universe, and everything is in any sense meaningful or purposeful." Were you trying to get to a purpose that is actually meaningful for humans? I don't think your OP addressed that, other than to say that merely asking the question must imply some framework in which "meaning" can figure -- "The moment we ask whether something is meaningful, we’re already inhabiting a world structured by purposes." And I share @T Clark's doubts about whether that follows.

Another way to say this: By focusing on the question of whether the universe has a purpose, you seem to be implying that an affirmative answer will mean something in terms of human purpose. Again, I may have missed it, but I don't see that discussed in the OP. Never too late, though!

Appreciate these thoughts. I'm outta here for now but will definitely reply.

I think we're just trying to get straight on terminology. You seem to want any occurrence of a sentence to be an assertion of what it says (just as a table is, analogously, an "assertion" of what the pile of wood is), and I could imagine a framework where that was what everybody agreed. But then we'd need a different term to refer to the way assertions are commonly demarcated -- that is, as occurrences of sentences where some individual is using them to judge the content as true.

the mere occurrence of a sentence does not amount to an assertion of that sentence. — Banno

Yes, I'm not meaning to deny this. Without some such stipulation, we could hardly begin to create a workable structure. Nor could we fit the idea of "occurrence of a sentence" into our actual lives, which offer so many opportunities and manners for sentences to occur.

We could agree that "P" is an assertion from someone. The quotes indicate that? Does that work? — frank

Yes, we could agree as to that. And that's usually what we do: We read "P" as something that can be asserted by someone -- a performance that someone can make -- and in some contexts we just take it as written that "P" has been asserted.

Nothing wrong with any of that. They're examples of what I meant by "some stipulations about how to hang the concepts together." The important point to me is that we don't treat "proposition" and "assertion" as if they have prior meanings that we discover, or that an ideal logical language would reveal as necessary.

So if I say: "an example of a proposition is: 'The cat is on the mat.'" I am saying something like: "it is true that S is an example of P," but crucially, not asserting S. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good. Now take it a step further. Call this statement Q: "'S' is an example of P"; and this statement R: "It is true that 'S' is an example of P" ("It is true that Q").

Q itself is, presumably, also a proposition. I still haven't asserted S, of course, but have I asserted Q, if I don't also assert R? Or do I need the words "It is true that . . ." in order to turn "Q" from a sentence/statement/line of poetry into an assertion? Do I need to construct R in theory (in a post, for example), or is something more required?

Once we start asking questions like this, we see again how "queer" (in the Wittgensteinian sense) propositions and assertions are. I'm not saying these are profoundly unanswerable questions, only that the answers rely more than we like to acknowledge on some stipulations about how to hang the concepts together.

Interesting metaphor. I'm assuming you mean balls of the testicular variety? Is it a good thing to have that kind, when it comes to deciding what to assert as true? Just asking . . . And if I'm taking you more seriously than you intended, sorry, it's hard to judge tone in a post!

You might have a look at the Ring of Gyges tale in Book II of the Republic.

Excellent, thank you. I hope Nagel's take on this will be increasingly shared both within and without the scientific community.

I have some minor quibbles about teleonomy -- I think the distinction with teleology is more meaningful than you do -- but they're not worth going into.

But here's my main question: Let's grant that biological life is purposive in all the ways you say it is. Let's even grant, which I doubt, that all living creatures dimly sense such a purpose -- gotta eat, gotta multiply! The question remains, Is that the kind of purpose worth having for us humans? Is that what we mean by the "meaning of life"?

Indeed -- and I think Nagel goes into this as well -- it's precisely the pointlessness of the repetitive biological drives you cite, that causes many people to question the whole idea of purpose or meaning. It looks absurd, both existentially and in common parlance: "I'm alive so that I can . . . generate more life? That's it? Who cares?" Cue the Sisyphus analogy . . .

Any thoughts about this?