Why not? — Luke

By definition, there does not exist empirical criteria for asserting self-unconsciousness in the present. So the proposition "I am presently unconscious" is presumably meaningless when taken in the fullest possible sense. In which case, an assertion of self-unconsciousness can only amount to a speculative hypothesis regarding an absence of a previous mental state (or equivalently, of the presence of an unconscious past mental state).

Typically, a person appeals to a present state of amnesia to infer that they were unconscious in the past. Whether or not one accepts the validity of this inference depends on one's conception of memory. An empiricist isn't likely to regard an inability to remember the past as saying anything literal about the past.

If there were no experiential dimension then there would be no hard problem, but since there is, there is. — Luke

Consider what it would mean to say that there is no experiential dimension. Unless that possibility is conceivable, then the hard problem isn't conceivable. Can you really conceive an absence of experience?

Consider the empirical criteria we might use when we assert that a sleeping person is unconscious. Then consider the rational arguments the the sleeping person uses after waking up, when they infer on the basis of amnesia to have been unconscious during sleep.

Is our empirical criteria regarding the present unconsciousness of a sleeping person the same as, or even comparable to, the amnesia that the awoken person appeals to when inferring "self unconsciousness" in the past?

You are asking basic questions that concern the topic of "Denotational Semantics", which use partially ordered sets (more specifically, Scott Domains) to denote partial states of evaluation with respect to the computation of a term such as a number. Terms of any type are represented as having a totally undefined value prior to evaluation, a partially defined value during the course of evaluation, and in the case of finite terms that can be fully evaluated, a totally defined value after evaluation known as a "normal form".

In denotational semantics, the Type corresponding to 'Computable real numbers' refers to the set of fix-point equations that if iteratively applied on a given rational number, generates a sequence of prefixes that are Cauchy convergent. To obtain an extensional value for a term of 'computable real number type' requires iteratively evaluating the term and then terminating the iterative evaluation abruptly after an arbitrary number of finite iterations, to produce a finite prefix representing a rational number that is very misleadingly said , to "approximate" the real number concerned (it is misleading since we are comparing apples, namely fix-point equations that are defined intensionally in terms of equations and that refer to types, to oranges that are observable states of computation that refer to terms.

A question remains as to who gets to decide when to terminate the iterative evaluation : the interpreter/compiler, or the user of the program? In programming languages with strict semantics, their respective interpreters and compilers always evaluate the term of every type to the fullest extent possible, meaning that real numbers cannot exist as types in such languages, since their terms have no "normal form" and would cause programs to loop endlessly if evaluated. In such languages, real number constants tend to be denoted by rational numbers with a priori fixed values decided at compile time.

By contrast, in a language with lazy semantics such as Haskell, terms can be used and passed around in partially evaluated form. This means that real numbers can exist in the sense of partially-evaluated "infinite lists" consisting of an evaluated prefix and an unevaluated tail. These lazy languages allow runtime conditions to decide what rational value is used in place of a term of real-number type, which is allowed to vary during the course of computation and which corresponds more closely to the notion of "potential infinity".

In mathematics, one has to distinguish intensional definitions from extensional interpretations. The former refers to analytic tautologies of an assumed convention, such as Pi being declared as the "exact" ratio of circumference to diameter. Such propositions say nothing of the actual world, because they are norms of linguistic representation.

On the other hand, extensional interpretations of a convention refer to worldly observations to which a mathematics convention is applied, such declaring a visible circle to represent or "approximate" Pi. Here the word "approximate" is misleading, for the visible circle isn't part of the convention but an imprecise application of it. (Any application of a convention is invariably imprecisely applied)

The premise of a shared reality is incompatible with the premise of non-representational perceptual access for all. For if I judge my own perception of the world to be direct, deflationary and non-representational, then I must judge everyone else's perception of the same world as being indirect, and representational according to truth-by-correspondence.

The only way I can reconcile everyone's claims to be non-representational direct realists, is to interpret each and every person as referring to a different world.

If we continue down the tree with this alternating pattern RLRLRLRLRLRL... we approach the Golden Ratio.

Is there anything wrong with completing this tree and saying that the infinite digit RL is the Golden Ratio? — keystone

Constructively speaking, there's nothing wrong with your identification of real numbers with "infinite" paths, i.e. the non-wellfounded sets known as "streams", provided such paths are finitely describable. For a computable real is equivalent to a circularly defined equation that can be lazily evaluated for any desired number of iterations to yield a finite prefix. In your case, that would be an impredicatively defined binary stream such as S, defined as the fixed point condition

S = 1 x ~S

where _x_ is the cartesian product and ~ is logical NOT (i.e. S is the liar sentence).

To faclitate the identification of streams with cauchy convergent sequences, S can be considered equivalent to other streams for which it shares a bisimulation with respect to some filter for deciding how streams should be compared. The stern-brocot tree can also be interpreted as a game-tree, such that a computable real number is identified with a "winning strategy" for converging towards an opponent's position who attempts to diverge from the player's path to some epsilon quantity.

Surreal Numbers also share a similar binary- tree construction, and their fabled ability to embed the real-numbers might be recalled. But this rests upon the assumption that transfinite induction is valid, which isn't constructively permissible due to it's reliance on the axiom of choice. Your indicated idea of using fixed-points to define real numbers, although not original is more promising.

I believe the non-standard identification of real-numbers with streams and more generally co-algebras, was originally due to Peter Aczel in the eighties, who became famous for inventing/popularising non-wellfounded set theory. For an alternative approach to non-standard analysis that is constructive and sticks to well-founded sets by merely augmenting them with additional axioms to denote terms at the fixed points, see Martin Lof's notes under "The Mathematics of infinity"

Concepts are public. Concepts are norms. How else could you even ask me that question with a sense of being entitled to an answer ? A tacit commitment to the philosophical situation is prior to every other issue. I touch on that in my new thread, if you want to join. — plaque flag

That concepts are norms isn't the same as saying that concepts are public. These are two distinct semantic claims.

I have only had a precursory glance at Brandom's introduction to inferentialism but I suspect you might be misreading, or at the very least dramatically oversimplifying his views, which to a large extent is understandable given this is an abbreviated public forum space where people speak with highly constrained time and space and without knowing of each others prior knowledge and agendas.


In Chapter 5, "A Social Route From Reasoning to Representing" , Brandom makes generally non-controversial arguments that language serves as a medium of 'representation' in the context of social norms.

Beliefs and claims that are propositionally contentful are neces-
sarily representationally contentful because their inferential ar-
ticulation essentially involves a social dimension. That social
dimension is unavoidable because the inferential significance of a
claim, the appropriate antecedents and consequences of a doxastic
commitment, depends on the background of collateral commit-
ments available for service as auxiliary hypotheses. Thus any speci-
fication of a propositional content must be made from the
perspective of some such set of commitments. One wants to say
that the correct inferential role is determined by the collateral
claims that are true. Just so; that is what each interlocutor wants to
say: each has an at least slightly different perspective from which
to evaluate inferential proprieties. Representational locutions
make explicit the sorting of commitments into those attributed
and those undertaken—without which communication would be
impossible, given those differences of perspective. The representa-
tional dimension of propositional contents reflects the social
structure of their inferential articulation in the game of giving and
asking for reasons.
.

So, when speaking in the context of language being a medium for representation , then qualia - which by definition is said to refer to only what an individual speaker could know - gets the chop.

But what Brandom doesn't do in that passage is insist that meaning is essentially representational or that meaning and knowledge are necessarily public affairs. Indeed, that interpretation of Brandom would contradict the very idea that Brandom was an non-representational semanticist at heart. I suspect that Brandom, much like Wittgenstein, makes no negative semantic, metaphysical or mentalistic claims regarding the meaning or existence of "private language". I suspect that all he means, is that private concepts aren't being used representationally and hence beetles in boxes aren't an extensional aspect of the social representations inculcated by social norms. Nevertheless Beetles do matter when it comes to the perspectival and idiosyncratic aspects of language that are relative to each individual who must individually adapt their mother tongue in a bespoke inferential fashion to match their own worlds; such beetles are necessary, but lie beyond the aperspectival limitations of social norms and communication.

Whenever I understand myself to be seeing the "same" object as a someone else, I am not making a literal comparison of mine and their experiences, nor of mine and their semantic conditions of assertibility.

All I am doing is interpolating from my own experiences whether or not the sentence "We are seeing the same object" meets my personal criteria of assertability.

I radically disagree.

Social norms govern inferences in the first place. The situation is liquid enough, however, that an individual philosopher can get a new inference accepted / treated as valid. --- typically by using inferences which are already so treated along with uncontroversial premises. — plaque flag

Given that society rarely agrees upon anything and constantly changes its mind, not to mention the ever-changing customs of isolated Robinson Crusoes who have no access to society, I can't see what "social norms governing inferences" amounts to, nor do I see the ultimate relevance of social norms with regards to inferential semantics.

Do you mean that remark descriptively in the non-controversial general sense that philosophers are often influenced by their society, or do you mean it in the controversial prescriptive sense that philosophers ought to align with the prejudices of their society, because society gets to define what truth is, or that society must know better?

I claim that meaning is public. Claims don't represent claimant's meaning-as-hidden-stuff. — plaque flag

Putting aside what privacy means, there are two very distinct ways of interpreting that claim.

A. Private Language is False.

This is a semantic claim . According to this interpretation, private language is a thinkable possibility that is nevertheless false in either theory or in practice. Often this interpretation assumes conventionalism about meaning, whereupon public convention is believed to undermine a speaker's ability to mean what he wants. Those who hold this view often attack a speaker for talking about "private language".

B. "Private Language" is Nonsense.

This is an ontological or meta-semantic claim. According to this interpretation, whatever might be called a "Private Language " is actually "public" as a matter of tautology. According to this interpretation, which makes no semantic claims, a speaker is free to say and mean anything he wants, because the act of speaking is always understood as referring to something that is happening in the world of the speaker, either via direct acquaintance with the speaker as in the case of "qualia", or indirectly with the speaker via some causal theory of reference. In both cases, the speaker is interpreted as referring to something true that is nevertheless "public", even in the case of "qualia".

Which claim are you making?

'Content' sounds representational again. The point is to look at which inferences tend to be accepted. Let me emphasize that these norms are 'liquid', unfinished, infinite task. — plaque flag

So do you agree that social norms are generally a terrible way of inferring anything about an individual's behaviour?

It'll be hard to understand me if you stick to a representationalist semantics. I like inferentialism, which I connect to something like neorationalism, (resource linked earlier in the thread if you are interested.) — plaque flag

That's odd, because my attacks on conventionalism are precisely an attack on representationalism, including the idea that conventions tell us about what speakers mean.

If meaning is inferential, then the references of a speakers utterances are strongly identified with the local and proximal causes of the speakers utterances, and only weakly identified with distal causes that perfuse the convention the speaker is using in an optional capacity.

How do you reconcile your commitment to inferential semantics with your apparent claim to know the propositional content of speakers utterances?

(When interpreted with empathy, do Flat-Earther's really exist?)
— sime

Yes. They make claims about our world in our language. Their claims have inferential purchase. If I believe them, I will also believe implications of their claims --- which may be why I can't believe them, for their claims imply others that are not consistent with other of my beliefs. — plaque flag

But do people really share the same belief objects whether agreeing or disagreeing about the truth of a proposition? For how can linguistic conventions decide what the object of a proposition is?

If you accept that the Earth isn't flat, then you presumably accept that a flat Earth cannot be the physical cause of a Flat-Earther's beliefs. In which case, how and in what sense can he be said to be referring to the Earth?

When you interpret a flat earther to be speaking about 'our earth', are you claiming to have knowledge about the speaker's beliefs, intentions, mental state, circumstances and so on? or are you merely referring to what convention says about the speaker's verbal behaviour?

The norms of linguistic convention are certainly correlated to facts about the world, for otherwise nobody would ever trust each other's remarks. But can this justify elevating the status of convention to the ground or justification of meaning? For don't our conventions often mislead and betray us about the facts of truth and meaning?

You challenge me (within the norms of politeness too, another ethical frame) in the name of inferential norms, calling upon me to defend my claim. Indeed, in making that came, I have indeed committed myself to its defense. If I can't defend a strong challenge, it's my duty to withdraw or modify the claim. — plaque flag

Ultimately, epistemic agreements and disagreements rest upon assumptions as to what speakers means by their words:

Doesn't it strike you as odd, the assumption that a person can believe in something impossible? For what is said to be impossible is also said to not exist, and so cannot be said to be the cause of the person's belief. So how can a belief even refer to something that is impossible?

And what then of falsified beliefs? Aren't they also a problematic concept for similar reasons, for weren't one's previously held beliefs, that one presently judges to be "falsified", also caused by something that fully explains their previous existence?


Isn't a physicalist, who is committed to a causal understanding of cognition, forced in the name of objective science to always side with the epistemic opinions of the speaker, no matter how wrong, mad or contradictory the speaker might sound? For shouldn't the physicalist always interpret a speaker's utterances in the same manner that he interprets as a sneeze that is understood to refer to nothing more than it's immediate causes?

(When interpreted with empathy, do Flat-Earther's really exist?)

One supports this approach phenomenologically, which is to say by simply bringing us to awareness of what we have been doing all along. Scan this forum. See us hold one another responsible for keeping our stories straight. See which inferences are tolerated, which rejected. Bots can learn this stuff from examples, just as children do. — plaque flag

From the perspective of an engineer who has a causal understanding of AI technology and a responsibility to fix it, the gibberish spoken by an "untrained" or buggy chatbot is meaningful in a way that it isn't for a naive user of technology who is intending to play a different language-game with it. And obviously, any agent of finite capacity can only learn to play well at one language game at the expense of doing worse at the others.

I am also not allowed to contradict myself, for the self is the kind of thing (almost by definition) that ought not disagree with itself --- must strive toward coherence, to perform or be a unity. — plaque flag

When you find yourself disagreeing with the beliefs of your earlier self, are you really contradicting your earlier self? For didn't the facts of the matter change that you were responding to?

Consider a sequence of beliefs {b 1,b 2, b 3 ...} regarding the truth of the "liar sentence" L unfolded over time, where L = "this statement is false" :

b 1. Presently at time t = 1, L is believed to be true.
b 2. Presently at time t = 2, b 1 is understood to imply that L is false, and hence that b 1 is false.
b 3. Presently at time t = 3, b 2 is understood to imply that L is true, and hence that b 2 is false.
b 4. Presently at time t = 4, b 3 is understood to imply that L is false, and hence that b 3 is false.

In spite of the fact that each belief negates the previous one, each belief can nevertheless be considered to be "true" at the time of it's construction without entailing contradiction with any of the other beliefs, for none of the beliefs were simultaneously held to be true, and each belief refers to a different object, namely it's own temporal context.

Jj asdoin asdmoi valfm capicasdjknca p spdmcsd l sd p p m[ o [o,asdcvvdflmvdf. — plaque flag

Are you implying that a public language must be decipherable? What about encryption?

When the public cannot agree on a linguistic convention, as is so often demonstrated when debating the philosophy of language, where does the authority of meaning reside then?

Consider Humpty Dumpty's famous proposition

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.' — lewis carroll

If meaning is considered to be use, as Humpty is suggesting, then how can meaning-as-use be grounded in linguistic convention?

Also consider the fact that any explicitly defined linguistic convention can only be finitely specified, implying that there is always uncertainty as to the intended meaning of a convention. (which is another of Lewis Carroll's remarks that argues against the grounding of meaning in convention).

Video games occasionally have procedurally generated worlds that are generated dynamically on-the-fly in response to the player's actions. These games demonstrate that the unknown past and the future can be considered as being metaphysically identical for all empirical intents and purposes. This parsimonious viewpoint has the advantage of treating causality in a temporally symmetric fashion, with both forward and backward causation.

I'm not saying there isn't a beetle in your box. I'm just saying the concepts are public. You don't get to make up your own language and your own logic ---and that's what oxymoronic private concepts would entail or mean (inasmuch as I can parse the phrase at all.) — plaque flag

And why not?

(I'm an Epicurean-Spinozist — 180 Proof

Wasn't Spinoza an idealist in all but name? At the very least, isn't his metaphysics compatible with "being is perception"? I don't see how matter as divine immanence can be closer to ontological naturalism (which has no concept of immanence) than to idealism for which immanence is a tautological truth.

As for Epicurus, as an empirically minded philosopher, didn't he stress the epistemic primacy, if not ontological primacy of sense-data? I'm also not seeing any real points of disagreement between the ontological arguments of Berkleley and Epircurus, save for whatever brand of atomic materialism Epircurus might have subscribed to, (which at most would amount to a physics disagreement with Berkeley , as opposed to a metaphysics disagreement). If both are understood to be empiricists who rejected Platonism, then how is metaphysical disagreement between them possible?

I

The fact that they mean different things, with the first referring to the present and the second referring to the future. — Michael

Well yes, one might take it to be analytically true that a prediction is future-referring, meaning that skepticism regarding the future-contingency of a prediction is ruled out a priori as a matter of linguistic convention. But in that case, the future-contingency of the prediction cannot mean anything about the world in itself, and only speaks of present linguistic conventions, speaker attitudes and so on.

When we speak of "failed predictions", we interpret past utterances as referring to the present. Relative to this convention, it might be considered to be analytically true a posteriori that a past utterance is present referring. But to say that past utterances are present referring, is again not to speak of reality but of linguistic convention.

As a matter of interest, do you consider ChatGPT's responses as future-referring?

So in your view, what makes a proposition future-contingent?

Suppose that a person looks at the sky and says

A. "There are ominous dark-clouds in the sky"
B. "In five minutes it will rain"

What makes B a future-referring proposition, in contrast to A that is merely a present observation?

Isn't the difference accounted for by the attitude of the person towards each case? In which case, isn't it fair to suggest that B isn't objectively speaking, a future-contingent proposition?

dispute that requirement. I can talk about the future. — Michael

Well, certainly I can accept that the word "future" has sense to you, as it does to me, but one can dispute that the word has reference beyond the immediacy of one's present. For whatever thoughts one presently identifies as being of tomorrow, one will presumably no longer regard them as being of tomorrow once tomorrow arrives...

How so? I don’t need to experience something to talk about it. — Michael

I can only interpret you as referring to something, in relation to an understanding of what your referring consists of. If my experience is private in the sense meant by philosophers, then ordinary means of referring that appeal to a causal linkage between another speaker and my experiences are ruled out. In which case, how I am supposed to interpret a speaker as referring to my experiences?

If experience is truly private, than it is presumably impossible to even refer to someone else's experiences in the literal sense of "someone else".

In which case, whatever legitimate doubts you might have regarding the quality or existence of "someone else's" experiences, is it not the case that for those doubts to be intelligible to you, your doubts must at least be defined in terms of empirical criteria that you yourself could observe in principle?

In other words, doesn't the privacy of experience actually imply that the problem of other minds is solvable in principle, contrary to popular opinion?

Philosophical questions regarding consciousness concern, among a great number of other things, the semantics of neuroscience in relation to the first-person perspective, as opposed to the scientifically established facts of neuroscience whose perspectival meaning and significance is undefined.

Philosophical questions also call into question the semantics and significance of science as a whole, and so it isn't possible to draw philosophical conclusions about consciousness from a narrow consideration of neuroscientific discoveries, because all that will be argued are circular tautologies that resolve none of the semantics of concern.

Since GPT is a merely an auto-regressive model of corpora on which it is trained to perform "next word prediction", then it will certainly reproduce the cultural biases of texts written in a given language.

But how is that evidence for Sapir-Whorf hypotheses? - i.e. the hypothesis that language affects cognition?

GPT will learn to parse text differently for each language on the basis of auto-regression, thereby having conceptual representations (neural activations) that vary according to the language, but this is true regardless of whether or not the texts of different languages exert different cultural biases. E.g a text that is written in two different languages will nevertheless have very different internal representations in an LLM. Furthermore, to identify two internal representations as meaning the "same" thing is to relate those representations to an external source of information in accordance to some translation scheme, an d so the semantics of neural activations isn't "in the head" of either humans or machines.

I think that the machine learning science of LLMs is telling us that without additional assumptions and contextual information, Sapir-Whorf hypotheses are generally meaningless, in referring to any number of different and independent aspects of the culture-cognition-language feedback loop.

You are implicitly referring to the logical paradox concerning the identity of indiscernibles.

The potential existence of indiscernibles, e.g perfectly identical twins who lead perfectly identical lives, except for their space and location, seems to imply that materialism cannot be reconciled with the subjective concept of self-identification in a way that would be acceptable to a materialist.

The materialist has several options with regards to his understanding of self-identification, but none of the available choices seem to look attractive to him:

1) He could accept the identity of indiscernibles and identify his 'self' as being the possibly infinite collection of physically identical selves that exist at different spatio-temporal locations throughout the universe; each of the physical entities in this collection not only has qualitatively indiscernible experience from one another, but is in fact the same experience, i.e. there is one psychological 'token' of experience shared between many physical lives.

The materialist presumably finds this option barking mad, for not only does it seem a bizarre proposition, but it seems to undermine the whole point of materialism, namely to explain the self as a physical token that is part of the causal nexus, rather than as an abstract and non-causal type of physical entity that is related to the causal nexus via dualism of some sort. It also goes without saying, that this choice also would play havoc with his understanding of science in general.

2) He could accept the identity of indiscernibles as above, but argue that the material universe is such that there are no actual physical indiscernibles. But this seems physically speculative and amounts to neo-Kantianism that goes against the grain of materialist epistemology (should a materialist be deducing materialistic implications from introspective a priori arguments?) This option also completely fails to address the underlying metaphysical problem concerning whatif there were indiscernible selves?

3) Alternatively, he could reject the identity of indiscernibles, by arguing that the spatio-temporal position of an individual is an internal property of the individual's mental state. But in this case it seems that he must either

a) give up the claim that the experiences of his self are explainable by causal laws, for his spatio-temporal position per-se has no causal relevance with regards to his experiential content, or

b) he must reject the Cartesian assumption that selves exist, whereby it is trivially the case that spatio-temporality is an internal property of the self-as-universe. But in this case, what is left of materialism seems dangerously close to idealism and even solipsism, that the materialist presumably wishes to distinguish and distance his beliefs from.

Indirect Realism accepts they have private sensations, but as argued by Wittgenstein in his beetle in the box analogy, such private sensations drop out of consideration within a public social language as irrelevant. — RussellA

Agreed.

Wittgenstein's beetle in the box analogy justifies Indirect Realism. — RussellA

Don't you mean to say that Wittgenstein's beetle in the box analogy justifies talk of indirect realism in relation to the third-personal public concept of perception, but that this doesn't justify talk of indirect-realism in the case of one's own perception?

" 275. Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How blue
the sky is!"—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical
intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of
colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming
that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the
words you point at the sky. I am saying: you have not the feeling of
pointing-into-yourself, which often accompanies 'naming the sensa-
tion' when one is thinking about 'private language'. Nor do you think
that really you ought not to point to the colour with your hand, but
with your attention. "

In relation to your diagram above of the two people perceiving the same circle, consider the irrealist understanding of the beetle on the box:

Given that each individual only has access to his or her private colour, and uses his or her mother-tongue in a bespoke private fashion when referring to the "shared" circle, then what is the purpose of colouring in the shared circle?


According to Nelson Goodman (and quite possibly Wittgenstein), there doesn't exist a transcendental underlying fact with regards to the real colour of the shared circle. Following this line of thought further, one could even deny the very existence of a shared circle, as part of a strategy for defending direct-realism for all perceivers, without condemning any ensuing disagreements as amounting to contradiction.

As a practice, mathematics is a family-resemblance of language games, whose premises are usually in conflict, in part due to the fact that they do not generally share the same logical assumptions regarding the justifications of a mathematical proof. Disagreements among mathematicians and logicians have concerned whether mathematical truth is reducible to the constructive notion theorem proving , which are disagreements that parallel, and often replicate, the historical disagreements between realists and idealists.

Intuitionistic logic, which corresponds to the mainstream Cartesian conception of computation in terms of the Church Turing Thesis, or equivalently, the behaviour of the ideal solitary computer, might be said to be solipsistic, since this logic makes the following assumptions:

1) Truth and theorem-proving are equivalent.

2) "Computation" is describable in terms of the solitary activity of an ideal individual making up rules and following them consistently, without any interaction with his environment playing a role in the meaning of "computation", whereby theorem-proving is considered to be a tautological exercise.

Classical logic on the other hand, accepts 2), but drops assumption 1) by it's appeal to The Law of Excluded Middle, which allows it to infer theorems for which there is no step-wise constructive proof.

This is the reason why many mathematicians are platonists; By rejecting assumption 1 they reject the idea that mathematics is a product of their minds, and yet by accepting assumption 2 they are also forced into rejecting the idea that meaning of mathematics is contingent upon events in the real world. The only way they can resolve the resulting dilemma is by positing an external platonic world of mathematical meaning.

Since the seventies, Computer science has slowly begun to break free of the the cartesian conception of computation, by questioning, if not rejecting, assumption 2), mostly as a result of needing to invent new logics for dealing with the empirical contingencies of computer-program IO. See for instance, the reactive-programming paradigm that concerns the problem of how to write programs to consistently reason with input-streams of data that are potentially-infinite and outside the control of the program.

We are not little homunculi driving robots and looking at screens. We are members of a community who live embedded in a shared world within and with which we collectively interact. — Banno

If a 'person' is taken as referring to a brain, and only to a brain, then a person is by definition a homunculus , hence a forteriori, a subject of indirect realism. Community interaction among brains cannot change this conclusion.

Irrealism tries to sidestep the dispute by claiming in a relativistic and solipsistic fashion, that direct-realism only applies in the first-person, i.e that only the first-person isn't a "brain person".

People should stop conflating metaphysical, epistemological and psychological solipsism, as their premises and conclusions are very different.

For example, in Metaphysical Solipsism "other minds" do exist empirically, in the sense of experiences that the subject has direct access to, even if the literal notion of other minds is considered to be unintelligible. Therefore, according to Metaphysical solipsism, empirical skepticism regarding the existence of "other minds" is unintelligible; Thus metaphysical solipsism is in agreement with analytic behaviourism.

Only in epistemological solipsism is there skepticism regarding the existence of either "other minds" or other minds, which is due to a Cartesian worldview that interprets sense-data and thought as being mere representation, which can lead to doubt as to whether there is anything behind the representation.

Psychological solipsists embrace the doubt of the epistemological solipsist to deny the existence of other minds. But in contrast to the metaphysical solipsist, they do not consider their personal sense-data as having constitutional relevance with respect to their concept of "other minds"

If metaphysical solipsism is true, then it is tautologically true. This is why metaphysical solipsism (and realism) have no empirical content.

People have a psychological tendency to misconstrue metaphysical solipsism with Cartesianism (psychological solipsism), due to the fact their use of the personal pronoun comes with a lot of baggage.

Berkeley's subjective Idealism, which is often associated with metaphysical solipsism, distinguished Ideas (that is to say , experiences with empirical content) from Spirits (the notion of volitional agents that aren't perceivable, pace Hume and Melbranche). The postulate "being is perception" therefore concerned ideas only, leaving intact the common-or-garden "vulgar" meanings of causality and "who" did "what".

Ironically, one of the central motives of metaphysical solipsism is to refute epistemological scepticism that doubts the reality of the "external" world, by arguing that the "external" world isn't external and therefore not doubtable.

You might be suffering more from the effects of social isolation and rumination than from a philosophical belief.

Solipsism has no empirical consequences. To associate a particular type of experience with solipsism is to misunderstand it.

I presently use the predecessor for coding projects as a plugin to Visual Code Studio, for filling in "no brainer" project detail and for providing a very rough first approximation to subsequent work that it cannot automate, on pain of needing a degree of prompt engineering that is as complex as manually writing code.

Given that GPT only appears to understand code, since it isn't a software verification tool, debugger, theorem prover, or test harness, and isn't meaningfully integrated with such tools, i would presently say that it's main use case is in giving very rough explanations or recalling very rough solutions to very common software problems, but I predict that it won't reduce the skills or knowledge burden for many IT professionals, due to the fact that employers will simply respond to it's existence by demanding that more development time is spent on more complicated and novel features that an LLM by itself cannot handle.

The software industry presently regards an LLM as being an " AI pair programmer" that works in tandem with users to solve problems in an interactive, iterative and cooperative fashion. I think that use-case of LLMs is also demonstrated in your dialogues above, where there is an iterative cycle of prompting the LLM for a response and then testing its response by independent means, followed by prompt adaptation and so on. I think this understanding of LLMs is applicable across all subject domains.

This raises the same question for each subject : what constitutes 'best practice' with regards to the prompt engineering and test cycle when GPT4 is used as a pair-programmer for researching, disseminating or applying that subject?

I just read in the news that GPT4 will be given internet access and the ability to run code. So it is clear that that it's role is ultimately to serve as a portal for domain specific reasoning networks consisting of inference engines and query-able expert nodes.

One potential side-effect of this however is 'reflection' - unlike a conventional gateway, the portal will be able to access an online representation of itself by calling itself. This feedback mechanism could facilitate the model to be extended with the ability to simulate and evaluate it's potential responses before deciding how to reply to the user, which could potentially lead to unstable behaviour, such as when a user traps it in a liar paradox.

By definition, LLMs are only models of language and therefore shouldn't be confused with reasoners or domain experts. They should only be thought of as a natural-language filter that comprises only the first step of a reasoning pipeline, for routing prompt information to domain specific models and for caching the responses of popular queries, so as to avoid unnecessary computation.

Consider an LLM to be a Bayesian prior over experts P( e | p ), that predicts how accurate an expert e's response will be if e is fed prompt information p. For example, Banno's example above demonstrated that ChatGPT knows the English of, but not the game of, "noughts and crosses". And so it is well positioned to forward Banno's prompts to a dedicated Noughts and crosses expert.

Given a collection of experts e1, e2, ... that are each trained to solve separate problems, the response r to a prompt p is ideally determined by feeding the prompt to every expert and taking a weighted average with respect to the LLMs output.

P ( r | p) = Sum m, P (r | m , p) x P ( m | p )

where P( r | p) is optimised by fine-tuning the LLM prior so as to minimise an expected Loss function

E [ L ( r , p) | P (r | p) ]

Those models had a strong tendency to hallucinate. GPT4 also hallucinates, sometimes, but its tendency to do so is sharply reduced compared to previous models — Pierre-Normand

I guess that depends on what you mean by "tendency", and whether or not you include the "wizard of Oz" Open-AI team that continually patches it's errors in the background.

In terms of being an LLM, any apparent improvements are merely down to increasing the size of the training set on which GPT 4 was pretuned (together with increased architectural capacity). If we are referring to it's innate ability to generalise correctly with respect to unseen inputs, then it is certainly not the case that it's tendencies to be correct have improved, due to the fact that it isn't a reasoner that can prove or verify theorems the hard way.

Such improvements would require augmenting the LLM with a planning module, together with domain-specific models that it would need access to for testing it's planned responses against, prior to replying to the user in that given subject domain. I'm sure these improvements are down the pipeline, with the chat-bot service fragmenting into a network of modular expert services that are maintained and improved separately.

The future of a "General intelligence" service can only be to serve as a front-end for a network of domain-specific intelligent services, at which point it could be asked how large does an LLM really need to be, if it's eventual use is only to interpret requests before forwarding them to domain specific services?

The trouble with LLMs, is that they don't grasp the computational complexity of a question; they produce instant copy-pasta in the same amount of time regardless of the difficulty of the question, and without providing a measure of confidence in their answer.

For example, when asking an LLM a simple variant of a well known logic problem, if that variant isn't in it's training set, it will likely respond quickly with a wrong answer, rather than returning "mmmm......." followed by thinking further to produce the correct answer, or to return "don't know".

Well expressed, interesting link. Wittgenstein, of course, took a contrary view to Augustin as to how we learn a language, treating it as becoming a participant in the activities of a community. It's not apparent hat this account could not be used here, that those "intelligible objects" are grasped as one becomes acquainted with the way they are used in a community. So learning what "2" is consists in learning how it is used by those around you, and using it within that community. — Banno

Wittgenstein never said communication was the essence of language , neither did he equate in all cases, truth conditions with community agreement. Sure, in some language games a sign such as "2" might be defined in relation to community responses - a good example is the Github code-repository for the mathematics library of the Lean Programming language that is used automate mathematics; it implements and comprises the meaning of "2" for the community of Lean users. But then there are many other use-cases that don't fall under this definition, such as the isolated platonist who privately identifies "2" with what he is seeing or imagining. If his use-case bears no relation to his community, then he might be said to be playing a single-player "Augustinan" language-game. Perceptual and aesthetic judgements tend to fall into this category.

Recall that Wittgenstein rejected logicism - he rejected the fundamentalism that equivocates arithmetic with analytic tautologies. He is in record of saying "I think I know what Kant meant when he said that 2+5 = 7 is synthetic" . If the propositions of arithmetic are regarded as being synthetic, then it implies that the meaning of such propositions is open to interpretation in each and every case.

Truth and falsity are relative to convention. Truth values can also be eliminated from discourse, if one is willing to abandon the idea of shared belief referents.

E.g, if i judge my earlier beliefs to be "false" on the basis of new evidence that I obtain, then I am taking the referents of my present judgements and my past beliefs as being identical, in order so that I can speak of the new evidence as falsifying my earlier beliefs.

Alternatively, I could consider the new evidence as constituting a new referent of my present judgements , in which case I consider my earlier beliefs to be obsoleted by the new evidence, rather than being falsified by the new evidence.

But life goes on with or without you right. I have no problem with such solipsism such as yours but it fundamentally rejects reality. — invicta

All solipsism rejects is the idea of absolute reality, analogous to special relativity's rejection of absolute motion. Solipsists are able to reconcile their surface-level disagreements by transforming the meaning of each other's assertions to fit their own frame of reference, in a manner analogous to using a Lorentz transformation.

So it isn't necessarily contradictory to assert that one is immortal from one's own perspective, yet mortal from another's perspective.

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