Sigh. The vaccine does not prevent a person from getting Covid. The vaccine significantly reduces the odds that you will catch it - and if you do catch it the vaccine significantly reduces the odds that you will have a serious case. — EricH

Sigh. No it doesn't. The vaccine significantly reduces the prevalence of cases in the community and significantly reduces the prevalence of serious outcomes in the community.

Whether the reduction in your risk, of either, was significant depends on what your risk was in the first place.

...besides which, as I understand @baker's position, it has nothing to do with the significance of the reduction and everything to do with the heartless abandonment of the poor sods for whom it doesn't work, or worse.

But, then to actually give a shit about that would require one to take a break from their work in Pfizer's PR team and actually look at one of the other major health interventions we could have been spending their $6 billion payday on, so I don't see much hope there.

Which of these is true?

1. John is wet if he is standing in the rain
2. John is wet if I believe that he is standing in the rain

...
— Michael

The first is not equivalent to the latter two.

We can define 'wet' without using 'standing in the rain' (or any synonyms for it). Easily done.

We can't define 'bachelor' without using 'unmarried man' (or any synonym for it). Nor can we define 'knowledge' without using 'the facts are as he believes them to be' (or any synonym for it).

The first is causal, the others definitional.

We don't use the word 'wet' to describe people who've been standing in the rain (not definitionally). We use the word wet to describe people we believe are covered in water.

The definitional equivalent would be...

1. John is wet if he is covered in water
2. John is wet if I believe that he is covered in water

In which case, yes, the two are equivalent (as spoken or written by you).

You seem to be arguing that because we have a model of 'A causes B' we must for some reason conclude that such a model must apply to the way we determine what words mean, something like a B which somehow causes the expression under consideration. But determining the meaning of a word is not an exercise in causality. It's the result of empirical investigation, trial and error practical experience.

It seems a bit of a stretch to me to say the brain effectively contains images from the methods in the study. — fdrake

I agree. I was quite careful to be circumspect about the degree of progress along the road.

I think my grumblings would derail the thread. Nevertheless I've put them in this hidden box. — fdrake

I can't do the hidden box thing, so people will just have to lump it. Picking apart the methodology is as least as interesting as the actual topic.

( 1 ) since the model linking FMRI signals and the extracted feature from the layers doesn't seem to have a neural mechanism associated with it, the overall algorithm run doesn't have a demonstrated 'port to the wetware', so to speak. It doesn't seem established to run in the brain. I think it's thus evidence for the weaker claim that 'it's possible to reconstruct some images from fmri signals' rather than 'fmri signals encode images in a way similar to what is portrayed in the paper' — fdrake

Yes. Agreed. I hope I wasn't read as making such a claim, I'm indicating a direction I think the research is going rather than claiming a milestone has been reached.

The way I see it, if a DNN can 'learn' to decode fMRI scans into something - anything - then it's proof of principle (which is all I think the authors were going for) for a method by which we can develop candidate models. We obviously then need to actually test those candidates.

( 2 ) The subjective appraisal procedure for accuracy had a strange design and metric:

For the subjective assessment, we conducted a behavioral experiment with another group of 9 raters (4 females and 5 males, aged between 19 and 36 years). On each trial of the experiment, the raters viewed a display presenting a reconstructed image (at the bottom) and two candidate images (at the top; its original image and a randomly selected image), and were asked to select the image similar to the one presented at the bottom from the two candidates. Each trial continued until the raters made a response. For both types of assessments, the proportion of trials, in which the original image was selected as more similar one was calculated as a quality measure.


It measures which of two presented images was 'more similar' (subjectively) to the subjects (an ordinal value) and then the number of agreements was presented as a % accuracy. From the set up they described:

In both objective and subjective assessments, each reconstructed image was tested with
all pairs of the images among the same types of images (natural-images,
geometric-shapes, and alphabetical-letters for images from the image presentation
sessions, and natural-images and geometric-shapes for images from the imagery
session ; e.g., for the test natural-images, one of the 50 reconstructions was tested with
49 pairs consisted of one original image and another image from the rest of 49, resulting
in 50 × 49 = 2,450 comparisons).


Chance is 50% accuracy. Effectively this is a simulation of whether a human could relabel the image generated into the training data corresponding to the type of the original image -eg, inferred lion features with lions when given a single alternative. Considering the pixel crosscorrelation of test features and images was reported as 66%, even mildly increasing the number of comparison images (at the expense of 'complete cases' of comparisons) could very well undermine the claim to 95% accuracy.

If you look at the images, you can do a fair guess of which image is in which labelled category from just the background and colour space (lions are kinda yellow). Willing to bet the similarity is a priming effect of seeing the images on the same screen rather than labelling the DNN's feature as a perceptual type. Eg which of the reconstructed images of subject 2 is a lion and which is a mouse without knowing which is which beforehand?

I'm sure there's an argument there that perceptual feature visual content is not the same thing as an inferred label of the perceptual feature visual content - but that's an argument which should not have to happen. Should've been taken away in the controls of the subjective experiment - or run another to see if people labelling images with categories (is this brown smudge a lion or a mouse?) produces analogous accuracy measurements (and we all know it wouldn't based on the sample reconstructed images). — fdrake

I hadn't picked up on that, it is weird. Other approaches don't use this method - see Rosca for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04987.pdf which is sort of a seminal paper of this approach (for me anyway - I'm not necessarily up to date with this) Rosca used a dual network (adversarial and variational) which I thought was a standard training methodology.

( 3 ) The experimental design is there to generate test and training data for the neural network, insert bucket of ecological validity concerns here. A person's brain processing is as much devoted to a single image at a time as is possible and they are stationary. — fdrake

Yes, but given the relative isolation of hierarchically separate cortices I don't think this would be too disruptive to a generalisation of the results. The regions being examined are very specialised and specific to their tasks. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the ecological validity concerns, only that I think they're not big enough here to get much in the way.

Of course, if anyone were to make any claims about AI 'reading our minds' resulting from this, that would be utterly ridiculous. But what kind of world would we live in where media outlets would be stupid enough to do that!

https://time.com/5874444/science-of-nightmares/

Oops!

( 4 )

For test datasets, fMRI samples corresponding to the same stimulus or imagery were
averaged across trials to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the fMRI signals. To
compensate for a possible difference of the signal-to-noise ratio between training and
test samples, the decoded features of individual DNN layers were normalized by
multiplying a single scalar so that the norm of the decoded vectors of individual DNN
layers matched with the mean norm of the true DNN feature vectors computed from
independent 10,000 natural images. Then, this norm-corrected vector was subsequently
provided to the reconstruction algorithm. See Supplementary Methods for details of the
norm-correction procedure.


Gives me the willies - is it normal to manipulate the test data in a manner you didn't do to the training data? Effectively what's been inferred on is the average FMRI space-time series, but the model was fit on non-averaged ones. At what point would that decision be made? Is it standard? Did I misread it? — fdrake

I think that was the point. They wanted to be able to test the network performance by looking at the difference. I don't know how 'standard' it is, but I've seen the approach before. Here for example
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2021.754587/full (where you might prefer the lack of priming opportunities!)

To be honest, I could have picked a much better paper to give the impression I wanted to give, but it was late and that one was the first on my Zotero!

information more or less unconsciously ascends through areas responsible for particular processes such as recognition of lines, shapes, positions, objects etc. in the visual system — Enrique

...with you so far...

then somehow impinges upon a specially adapted neural network's CEMI field where percepts (if you don't want to talk about the quantum underpinnings, I won't get into it) are ultrasychronized on a relatively large scale via phase locking to contribute towards domains of the perceptual field which of course extensively integrate via synesthesia-like mechanisms. — Enrique

...eh?

I have trouble discerning where these CEMI fields might be located and thought perhaps you could have some ideas... — Enrique

...none, I'm afraid.

...once you're familiar with the theory. — Enrique

Do you have a citation I could look into?

being a bachelor means that you have not gone through various processes, at the very least, being wed, whether in a church or a civil ceremony or a registry office. — Janus

Well yes. even 'means' means different things in different contexts. Here you're using it to describe the behaviours one would have to have done to be likely to be referred to as a 'bachelor'. That's not the same use of 'means' as in "bachelor means and unmarried man" where 'means' is telling us how to use the word.

Part 1 is a belief; I believe with my mind, which is a product of my brain, which is in my skull; so part 1 is something going on in my skull. — InPitzotl

Already you're mixing up the mode of identity being used. "part 1 is something going on in my skull". No it isn't. part 1 is a statement, what's going on in your skull is firing neurons and neurotransmitters. What you mean to say is that part 1 is about what's going on in your skull.

So

"it's raining" does indeed talk about what's "outside my window", — InPitzotl

It cannot. It attempts to talk about what's happening outside of your window, it intends to talk about what's happening outside of your window. It cannot actually do so directly because you do not have direct access to what's going on outside your window. It's of no consequence in normal conversation, but it's clearly what we actually do when we say "it's raining".

I just don't see how you or @Michael could possibly deny that, in using the expression "it's raining", we take our belief that it's raining, our desire to communicate that belief (for whatever reason) and formulate the behavioural strategy {say "it's raining"}. The actual weather plays only a supporting role in that something of the actual weather probably triggered our belief that it's raining.

The point isn't so much that we don't tell people things to get them to believe it; but rather, that telling people things to get them to believe it isn't the point; beliefs aren't the ends you're making them out to be. — InPitzotl

Not getting that from what you've said. Beliefs still seem to be the end point, just sometimes we don't care if the belief matches ours (we don't believe the sandwich is poisonous but we want them to)

The father's information helps the mother prevent herself from actual wetness caused by the actual rain. — InPitzotl

...by getting her to believe it's raining.

we're agents navigating a world. — InPitzotl

How do we navigate the world? How do you even put one foot in front of another without a belief that doing so is an appropriate next step for you?

Let me know if you want a response to the rest. — InPitzotl

It's what I'm here for, though I've hardly any time in the week at the moment, so responses may be few and far between. Always interested in what you have to say.

if John isn’t an unmarried man (i.e your belief is wrong) then your assertion that John is a bachelor is false. — Michael

Indeed, on discovery of such a set of circumstances it would also be inappropriate to use the term 'bachelor', so there's no separation between appropriate and 'true'.

Up until this new belief (that John isn't an unmarried man), it's appropriate to use the term 'bachelor', on updating to this new belief it's no longer appropriate.

That it’s appropriate to say what you say isn’t that what you say is true. Your assertion that John is a bachelor can be appropriate, given what you believe, but false given the actual facts. And your assertion that you have knowledge can be appropriate, given what you believe, but false given the actual facts. — Michael

Indeed, very possibly. We're talking about what 'bachelor' means, what 'knowledge' means. What's 'true' is another matter. Although you probably won't like my preferred ideas about what's 'true' either...

I can use the word 'bachelor' to describe John and later come to believe I was wrong, I can use the word 'bachelor' to describe John and you, at the time, believe I'm wrong.

What makes no sense is to talk about me using the term 'bachelor' to describe John and just being wrong, absent of anyone believing I'm wrong. It's not a state we can access, we can't act on it, it can never form part of our lives, none of our language or concepts can be based on it...

The state you describe as me just being wrong is just you believing I'm wrong but wanting to reach for a bigger stick than that with which to beat your detractors. "Ahh, no it's not just my opinion...you actually are wrong"

You’re equivocating. — Michael

Well then, as I've asked before, if circumstances of felicitous use don't give us the meaning of terms, what does?

If I say that "to know" 'really' means 'to have a hat on', what criteria are you going to draw on to tell me I'm wrong?

There's no debate about what it means to be dead (or not much anyway). There's debate about what it means to know.

No-one is arguing that your position is incoherent (at least I'm not). It's a perfectly coherent possibility, it's just not the possibility which actually pertains.

'To know' could mean what you say it does. It just doesn't happen to.

Are you familiar? — Enrique

Not something I'm familiar with, I'm afraid. I will look it up.

I clarified the mistake you're making here:... — Michael

No. It's the same issue.

'Bachelor' is a term given to people who the user believes are unmarried and the who the user believes is a man. That is how 'bachelor's used. It is not reserved for use only when we have managed to obtain some sort of objective fact about a person's sex or marital status.

You're labelling it as a wrong use of the word, but I'm calling it a correct use of the word, just a wrong belief. It's correct to use the word 'bachelor' of someone you believe to be unmarried and believe to be a man, it's how everyone uses the word and it would be perverse to suggest it wasn't correct (ie everyone is wrong).

You might later come to believe that he is married, or a woman (or both), so now, believing this, it would no longer be correct to use the word 'bachelor'.

With the word 'knowledge' it's the same. It must be correct to use the word of something which you have strong justification to believe (particularly if that justification is the agreement of your epistemic peers) because that is how the language community uses the word, it would be perverse to say they're all wrong.

You may later come to believe that you justifications were not strong enough to warrant the term, but by the time you believe that, you no longer use the word.

So "I thought I knew the way to the pub but it turns out i didn't" means that you thought your justifications were strong enough, but it turns out they weren't, stronger ones (the evidence of your eyes) now lead to a belief that the pub is not where you thought it was.

Let's say you know that the answer to some question is X not Y, i.e. you have whatever standard of truth is necessary, but I don't. I have to figure out the answer from clues, and come to the belief that the answer is X but I could be wrong, that is I might have made a mistake as I have only clues (a WYSIATI error or some such). I tell you what I believe the answer is and why. You agree that my reasoning is sound and that I hold a JTB. — Kenosha Kid

So I can agree to that broadly (because you have 'truth' as being merely a sufficient threshold, a 'standard'), but where I still take issue is that the 'standard' can be no more than a set of justifications (usually something like - most of my epistemic peers agree, every time I act as if it's the case I get the expected results - these are the 'gold standard' justifications), so there's no difference in kind between your belief and mine, it's just that my justifications are better. One of the biggest complaints I have about JTB is that it makes a big deal of some unspecified threshold (truth vs other justifications), yet ignores what I think is the most important aspect of judging beliefs which is the relative quality of your justifications (the 'Gold Standard' I mentioned above, for example).

and @fdrake

This is where things are currently at

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/12/30/240317.full.pdf

We need a kind of AI to 'learn' the translation as we go, without this in between step, there's nothing... yet.

I have aphantasia — Dawnstorm

Ahh, well that is interesting! I don't know enough about the condition to even begin to discuss how the process I'm describing might affect you I'm afraid.

It feels like I'm aware of what's going on in my head in somewhat the same way that I'm aware there are platypuses in Australia. External stuff experienced in the past; no situationally present trigger or connection. If I apply neuroscientific knowledge to myself then I objectify myself, and it's all theoretic. — Dawnstorm

Yep. Basically (for someone without aphantasia), your images of the rest of your room are constructed that way too, you 'know' where the wardrobe is in the same way (well, similar - I'm simplifying). You're constructing your awareness of the room in part out of stuff you know about the room, not photons from it hitting your retina.

When you say decode, do you mean with loss? If so, what would be lost? — fdrake

Great question! I don't know enough about it to answer accurately, but, yes with loss (I've actually been shown some of the images, they just look like fuzzy versions of real pictures). As to what's been lost...my guess is there'd be three elements...

1. Some raw data - capture isn't going to be perfect.
2. Some secondary data - I don't know how the team are learning to distinguish data over the time series, which signals are being rejected under backward acting suppression by higher regions. If it simply learnt and re-iterated all the signals the result would be an absolute mess with all the neuronal noise and earlier modelling iterations.
3. Data we thought was visual but turns out isn't - if we ever got a perfect decoding from the visual cortex, my guess is that it would still look 'slightly off' to us. I'd look at a rose, see the picture of the rose I was looking at and think "yeah...but not quite". I suspect we add a considerable amount of embellishment to even the simplest of images.

Then I say, but there's a difference between me passively seeing something I cannot help but see on the one hand, and me either actively conjecturing or remembering by association some facts about what I see. And then I think you say that that's all we're doing anyway when constructing these representations. — Kenosha Kid

Oh dear, I'm becoming a bore.

whatever I'm seeing _seems_ to come to me fully formed. It doesn't seem like it would benefit from deliberation. — Kenosha Kid

You'd be surprised. Priming experiments have got a bad rap (quite justifiably! Shockingly bad methodologies most of them), but the theory is not so wildly outrageous. The impact of deliberate thought on image processing is not unreasonable. Here's a not too awful paper in it https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26566137/

efficiency I would imagine. It's much better for me to make decisions based on integrated, annotated, coloured-in if you will information. Same reason we do feature extraction and dimensionality reduction as part of preprocessing for training and using neural nets. Having to consciously parse raw data would render consciousness too slow to be useful. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, that's my take too, but V2 to hippocampus seems to buck that trend. The idea is that is possibly involved in early stage presentation of expectations from priors stored as memories of early perceptive features. The full paper is here https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4284/

When the JTB definition of knowledge states that John knows that it is raining iff 1) he believes that it is raining and 2) he is justified in believing that it is raining and 3) it is raining, it is simply stating in specific terms the more general definition that John knows what the weather is like iff it actually is as he justifiably believes it to be. — Michael

Yep. And as such the JTB definition of knowledge is wrong, because that's not how anyone ever actually uses the word 'knowledge' in any actual context because in all actual contexts people replace "actually is" with their own strong belief that it actually is.

That's it. Now walk into a room you're familiar with and see if you have the same awareness of the wardrobe, the bed, the view out the window... I can guarantee you didn't actually receive any genuine photon-signals from most of that stuff, but you felt aware of it, no?

Well can I turn that around and ask how you think we're conscious of the building of these models? — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, we could do it as a joint meditation exercise - has anyone got any patchouli?

If I'm aware of my laptop keyboard I feel like it's there in front of me, but I'm also aware of what's inside it, I can 'picture' the processor, the fan, the hard drive and they're real, I can plan to clean the fan by 'knowing' it's there behind the cover so I know where to put my screwdriver. This is a form of awareness.

Now I imagine the signals travelling between my retina and my visual cortex. just like the computer fan, it's behind a cover, but I know it's there. Just like the computer fan I don't have an 'accurate' image of it (I can't even remember what colour the computer fan is, so I just 'colour it in' ambiguously). We might say that it's not real awareness because it's not the actual signals I'm being 'triggered' by, but it's not the actual computer fan either, I can't see it or hear it, yet I'm aware it's there.

Taking it one step further, even without any previous experience to go on (of this actual laptop) I can infer the presence of a fan which I can 'place' in my model of what's behind these keys, just like I infer neuronal activity from my knowledge of how the brain works.

I guess it depends on how direct you like your models to be to class as awareness. The model of your phone is only a few jumps away from the hidden causes, the model of your gf is probably even closer (directly wired in it seems sometimes!). The model of your neurons which make you aware of them took a lot longer a route, via the signal from a poor epileptic test subject undergoing live brain surgery (probably) a neuroscience lab, a few men in white coats, a few papers, a few lecture theatres, an ageing academic on a philosophy forum...

I'm not aware of signals building up this picture. — Kenosha Kid

Then you're not doing it right! (a refrain I learnt from all the best teachers of enlightenment). Seriously, I think it's a personal thing as to what level of "I just made that up" we're willing to accept as genuine. Most (hopefully) won't just accept any old crap, we need the signal to have a kind of 'authenticity' marker (which is why I asked what token or marker you're expecting but not getting when you imagine your neurons firing), what sorts of mental images get that marker varies. My keyboard gets it because I can see it, but my fan gets it too, I really 'know' it's there. My firing neurons...? Just about, on a good day. The unicorn I'm now picturing...? Not even getting a look in.

We're not logging raw sensory input, it's processed in some way. I don't have a strong idea of when logging starts,I guess. — Kenosha Kid

That's true, but (my esteemed colleagues will correct me if I'm wrong here) there's nothing physiologically preventing us. There's absolutely no physiological reason why you shouldn't log the output of the forward acting region of your V3 area. "remember that left-right motion we saw the other day...". We just don't. There's definitely some link between V2 and the hippocampus which will affect memory logging in some way, but no-one quite knows how.

You're still ignoring context and trying to pin me down to one single meaning for expressions which clearly have different meanings in different contexts.

"It's raining", as a response to "will I need a coat" might well mean nothing more than "I believe it's raining".

"It's raining" on the end of

"John knows that it is raining iff:

1. John believes that it is raining,
2. John is justified in believing that it is raining, and
3. It is raining"

...might mean something more akin to "I believe it's raining, and I've good strong justifications for believing so"

Same expression, two contexts, two meanings.

So when you say "and I agree with him", this might be a casual concurrence with what we think is a good guess, or it might be a strong conviction that he has, in fact, reached the required threshold of justification.

Same expression, two contexts, two meanings.

I agree that we respond to things that we perceive (such as red flowers). But I was referring to KK's "image of 'red flower'". Where does that fit into the "perception" story, on your view? — Andrew M

Well I can't speak for @Kenosha Kid's understanding (although I just did in my post to you, so... oops), but I think we can justifiably use the term 'image' to describe what exits the visual cortex. We're already not a million miles away from being able to directly decode the neural signal leaving that area into an actual computer image. Much like I might say "I have an image of my house here on this USB stick"

No, they sound quite different to me, not sure how you got there from what I said.

Try this.

Jim: the weather in Barbados is sunny, it's always sunny in Barbados, I've been there.
John: I'm actually in Barbados right now and I can tell you, it's not sunny, it's raining
Jim: I don't believe you
Jack (to Jim); John knows what the weather's like, he's actually there!

Is anything about that conversation odd?

Does John or Jack have infallible direct access to the truth about the weather in Barbados? (ie can't be wrong)

I presume the answers are 'No' and 'No'. So the expression "John knows..." is being used on the grounds that John's evidence, his justification for his belief, is very good (he's actually there, looking at the sky, getting wet...). It's not being used by comparing John's belief to the actual weather - no-one has direct access to that, they only have access to their various beliefs about the weather. It's their beliefs about the weather they're using to decide whether to use the term "John knows..." or reach instead for something like "John believes..." or "John thinks..."

You could do a @Banno and say that John does have direct access to the actual weather, that looking at it is as good as direct access to it. That's fine, it's a model I've some sympathy with, but then we'd have to clarify why Jim's access isn't direct. What is it about John's access that's categorically better than Jim's? Once we have that criteria, we have a definition of 'direct', but it's still essentially the same as I've been arguing - namely that at some level of justification we can say "John knows...", the only difference being that we also label this level of justification 'direct' to distinguish it from other levels which we call 'indirect'.

Perhaps this is pathological, but I am not aware of these processes. I know on an intellectual level that they occur, but have no conscious experience of, say, conjuring a colour from a current, or a shape, or depth in the way that I am conscious of a red flower close to me. — Kenosha Kid

OK, so stop me if this gets too 'new age', but how do you judge whether you have awareness of something? I don't mean that as a philosophical question, I mean it as an actual exercise to do now. Look at the red flower - you're aware of it. Think about the neurons firing from your retina, to your visual cortex, to your visual-spatial sketchpad... What's missing that means you don't feel 'aware' of the latter, what kind of signal were you expecting but found lacking?

that logging process is just as apt to be called a humunculus or Cartesian theatre. I'm not sure how you avoid such accusations if anything precedes that logging that isn't also logging. — Kenosha Kid

Such accusations don't bother me. If people want to model it as an homunculus, then I don't mind. I long ago came to terms with infinite regress, I couldn't progress in my field without it - it's models all the way down!

“X is true” is just saying that the actual facts obtain? — Michael

I never didn't get what the expression was trying to say. The expression "x must be an odd multiple of two" is a perfectly understandable expression too, it's just a criteria that's impossible to meet.

Saying "X is true", however, is an action, it's a thing people do, and what it means is determined by the conditions in which they perform that action - namely things like when they believe it with strong justification, or they believe it and their epistemic peers do too, or they just really, really want you to believe it.

The third condition is saying that the actual weather has to be as the person believes it to be. — Michael

Yes, I get that. But since people don't have direct access to 'the actual weather' yet still use the expression "I know what the weather is like", including it as a necessary condition for the proper use of that expression is flat out wrong.

the above isn’t the same as the below, which is false:

John knows what the weather is like iff he is justified in believing what he does about the weather. — Michael

It's not false. It's an accurate description of the conditions under which people generally use the expression "John knows what the weather is like", which is (so far) the only criteria that's been offered for judging what "John knows what the weather is like" means.

the usual demonstrations are about someone who has a justified belief that then proves true but for the wrong reason — Kenosha Kid

Wouldn't it proving to be true but for the wrong reason just be better justifications?

For me, if someone has a belief which is justified by reasons which turn out to be insufficient (the broken clock for example), then it's an issue of the quality of justification. Gettier skirts the issue by saying that seeing the clock say 12 is a sufficient justification for believing it's 12 o'clock, then saying "what if the clock was broken at 12". Well if it's possible for a clock to be broken at 12, then simply seeing the clock at 12 is not sufficient justification (in some circumstances - say if nuclear war depended on it), but it's perfectly sufficient in others.

So, in my model, all we have is the perception of the clock at twelve, and the later perception of the clock's broken mechanism (and presumably some other clock, not at 12). A community of people with beliefs about what the time is, talking to each other, behaving differently according to those beliefs.

I have no other components to the model. There's no {what the time actually is} component. Not because I don't believe in an external reality where the time actually is something, but because I don't see a role for such a hidden state in any of our discourse, and "I know..." is a form of discourse.

Essentially, I don't see a justified belief which turns out to be true, but not for the reasons given, any more problematic that a belief which turns out to be untrue because of faulty justifications. all that matters is the best quality of justification we can muster (and at what threshold we get to call it 'knowledge') - the relevant part is the justifications, it's those we can improve. That they can sometime lead us astray despite being 'good enough' is just an occupational hazard of being inside a Markov blanket, I don't think we need to alter our language to accommodate it.

(To my mind, and correct me where I'm wrong, perception and experience are not the same thing. Perception is the wibbly wobbly organisation of data into an always fleeting, always updating model of our environment. Experience is consciousness of that model. These might be two sides of the same coin, but still distinct.) — Kenosha Kid

As far as I'm concerned - spot on.

I was hoping you'd show up and harpoon my bubbles of misunderstanding. — Kenosha Kid

Ha! Harpoon at the ready.

1. Do you think we are conscious of the processes of forming those perceptions? (Harder question: at what point are we conscious of the causes of our perceptions? Are we conscious directly of photons incident upon retina? Of currents in optic nerves? Etc.) — Kenosha Kid

I'd have to say yes, but perhaps not for the direct reasons that might at first seem a 'yes' would indicate. I think that the developments of neuroscience (and cognitive psychology) mean that we have models of the process and that makes us conscious of it. I know it might seem like I'm missing the distinction between a putative model of something and the actual experience of that thing but then, thinking about it...what are we saying about our experience of anything? Only that we have model of it.

Consciousness is a tricky business with as many theories as there are scientists working on it. My personal preference demotes consciousness to a fairy trivial logging process, we are 'conscious' of that which we log to memory, experience being merely the process of doing so, always post hoc, always retrospective, we're never conscious of anything in real time, it's the reviewing of what's just happened to make sense of it that forms our experience. Advocates of this model usually use the term 'awareness' in place of where you're using 'conscious of' in order to distinguish it from the more technical 'consciousness' which is merely being 'online', all systems firing etc.

So, at what point are we 'aware' of our perception process? Quite late on. well after it's formed what we might call an image, we need the dorsal and ventral streams (identity and form) to recombine before we can even begin to contextualise what we've seen.

2. If we see a red flower next to a yellow flower, would you agree it at least _seems_ to us like there are two flowers with different properties, irrespective of how that seeming arises? — Kenosha Kid

Yes, definitely. I'd go further to say that unless we are actually dreaming or hallucinating, some hidden state must be not only causing that difference, but by virtue of doing so, must itself be sufficiently differentiated to do so.

nice to see you back. — Kenosha Kid

Thanks, likewise.

Maybe you missed it, ↪Isaac
, the same bullshit is definitely still present 90 years on. — jorndoe

What I 'missed' was any actual argument for your case beyond bland assertion.

Right, yeah, the inequalities are problematic and ought be addressed. — jorndoe

Go on then...

But do go on about your blanket "Big Pharma" hatred. :) (don't think anyone are cheering them on for the scandals) — jorndoe

Admitting the limits of our knowledge and acknowledging the weakness in the system are essential stages in gaining people's trust.

Acting like a bunch of fucking omniscient tyrants dogmatically simpering over their quasi-religious devotion to pharmacology is not.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/big-pharma-pfizer-moderna-astrazeneca-profiteering-covid-vaccine

(see the first image for example)

not the same, but the bullshit is. — jorndoe

Not in any way that actually matters. The effect of social media, the growing distrust of scientific institutions, the enormous lobbying power of corporations, the monetisation of public health, the increasing healthcare costs of an ageing population, the vulnerability from current and future biotechnology, increasing wealth inequality and consequent health inequality...

Not even the bullshit is the same.

But it makes a nice chant for those who want to sweep all the corruption, and systemic malfeasance under the rug of "Oh look at what the looney anti-vaxxers are saying!"

Distraction-based politics at it's best, sad to see so many acting as its ardent spokespeople.

Where's the thread on the unforgivable government failure to provide equitable healthcare?
Where's the thread on the criminal lack of community health facilities that made so many (mainly minorities) at risk?
Where's the thread on the heartless exploitation of government institutions which allowed the obesity crisis which made so many so vulnerable to this disease?
Where's the thread on the treadmill of lobbying, corporate positions and government agencies which erodes any trust people might have had in those institutions to a point where they're basically useless?
Where's the thread on the fucking genocide the pharmaceutical companies are enacting by their refusal to release patents for the drugs we fucking paid for?

...nowhere. Just endless cheap shots at a handful of people, through no fault of their own, too stupid to properly understand what is actually an extremely complicated situation.

If people are falling for misinformation, then stop whining about them and do something to make the information more convincing.

Really?

"'Cos smallpox is a virus and SARS-cov2 is a virus, everything must be the same."

What naïve historicism.

It's the assumption of an image between the perceiver and the object that suggests the dualism. That's the Cartesian theater - that we're only ever looking at images of red flowers, never red flowers. — Andrew M

No, this is a misrepresentation. @Kenosha Kid is not suggesting that we're 'looking' at images of flowers, the 'looking' is the name we give to the entire process. What @Kenosha Kid is referring to is our responses. Speech, action, emotional responses, strategies, and more complex mental reactions. These all result from the perception of the flower, not the flower.

just letting you know you are not insane) — I like sushi

I appreciate that, although, one of the useful quirks of writing here is to be so vehemently disagreed with. It's not something I get a lot of in real life. As I'm sure many here who've taught will know, one needs grounding every now and again to remind one that one's position as the 'arbiter of truth' in the lecture theatre does not extend into the rest of life!

What JTB is is a formal set of rules set up in abstraction and then extended to ‘reality’. Such ‘knowledge’ is S-Knowledge only and cannot be confirmed as U-Knowledge. — I like sushi

That's good way of putting it. It certainly covers the manner in which @Michael presented it in his last post. Statement 1 is referable to the real world - John says something like "I believe it's raining". Statement 2 likewise - John gives his reasons. Then Statement 3, he's asking us to treat differently - removed from the real world (where we can only ever form beliefs about whether it's raining), but somehow held in this abstract world where we have direct access to the states of affairs which cause our perceptions, access outside our Markov blanket.

It's not that I think we can't talk about hidden states - I'm doing so now and I'm understood (at least others I talk to about hidden states understand me). It's just that we need to be consistent about our models if we're to be understood. @Michael's statement above, to me, reads like...

"Harry Potter got up, went over to the window to see if it's raining, he couldn't quite tell so he asked JK Rowling who was writing this story whether she intended it to be raining or not"

We don’t need to use the term “true”. We can say that:

John knows that it is raining iff:

1. John believes that it is raining,
2. John is justified in believing that it is raining, and
3. It is raining — Michael

You saying (or writing) 'it is raining', in this context, is the same as saying that you believe it's raining.

Imagine the situation in the real world.

John says "I think it's raining" - that gives rise to (1).

John says "I can hear the patter on the roof, plus the forecast said it was going to rain" - that gives rise to (2).

You look out of the window, perhaps go outside and look at the sky, get wet etc. - that gives rise to (3).

But (3) is still just a justified belief. It's your justified belief, based on the justifications of your experience.

A third party might join the scene and say "yes, but you're on powerful hallucinogenic drugs, actually it's not raining at all. Their belief about (3) contradicts yours.

A fourth party might point out that the third party just wants to make you look bad, and it is, in fact raining...

(3) is only, and forever will only be, someone's belief.

3. is to to be understood as the propositional content of John’s belief, i.e what his belief is about. — Michael

But John's belief is about {the weather}. (3) is not {the weather}, it too is about {the weather}. (3) is a statement written by you about the weather. It can't be 'what his belief is about' because 'what his belief is about' is the actual weather and a proposition is not the weather.

How can an expression convey a weather condition? — Isaac

By being about it? I honestly have no clue what you're trying to ask here. — InPitzotl

It coveys a belief about a weather condition, not the actual weather condition (which is composed of atmospheric molecules).

Most of the time, it's used to get the listener to believe it's raining (by which I mean have a tendency to act as if it's raining - put a coat on, carry an umbrella, write a poem about it...). — Isaac

Most of the time, it's used to inform the listener that it's raining — InPitzotl

You seem to have just repeated what I said. Does a listener, sucessfully informed that it's raining, not now believe that it's raining?

The T is a relationship between the meaning of the claim and the state of affairs. The claim's meaning implies some truth conditions. The claim is true if the described state of affairs meet the truth conditions. A claim can be true even if nobody has any justifications for it.

Justifications are what you use to figure out what things are true. — InPitzotl

I'm quite clear now on what it is you believe to be the case, repeating it isn't necessary. What I'm pursuing is why you believe it to be the case.

we can (aka "can ever") ascertain truth using justification. — InPitzotl

Great. How?

Option (2) isn't about anything. It's part of a whole expression-act which is about the language game of quizzes. — Isaac

Isn't that a contradiction? — InPitzotl

No. A football is part of a game, it's not itself a game.

I think "justified" just means "with good reason", not "retrospectively justified". — Kenosha Kid

Ah. I had it as both. I considered that to be the distinction between justifications and reasons, the latter can't be post hoc but the former can...

It's supposed to distinguish from beliefs that are reached erroneously, but may also be true. — Kenosha Kid

Indeed, but 'true' is the ultimate post hoc justification (at least, that's the case I'm arguing). To say something is 'true' is simply to say that it's about as well justified as we can get.

For the sake of this discussion we must take some form of realism for granted. — Michael

That can be done (I don't consider myself anti-realist). It doesn't change the meaning of 'true' in JTB. I'm arguing that 'true' just means the same as 'justified belief' and so adds nothing. I'm not arguing that from an anti-realist position, just from a (roughly) Wittgensteinean approach to meaning.

The concept 'true' is an artefact of human language and it (mostly) means something like 'everyone clever enough would agree'. I argue it means this on the grounds that this is the use context in which we find the term.

If one does not want to rely on the competence of others, with no ability to change the outcome, then flying is the way to go. However, if one would rather own the responsibility of risk, have the potential to change, or at least react, to any adverse conditions that arise while in motion, then driving is hands down the way to go. — Book273

Exactly. There's this assumption that once one has two risk figures the decision is clear, as if humans take nothing else into account in their decision-making other than crunching the numbers.

It's odd that on the same site people can puzzle about the morality of deliberately killing one fat man vs merely allowing the deaths of five workers (various trolley problems), most are baffled as to why anyone would make any risk-based decision on any basis other than seeing which number is bigger than the other.

Given that the above are true, the following is false:

4) John is a bachelor iff the language community generally believes that John is an unmarried man — Michael

Yep.

Therefore, 1) and 4) do not mean the same thing. — Michael

Agreed. You seem to be assuming that if two speech act mean the same thing on one context, they must mean the same thing in every context. The first claim at (1) is in the context where you believe John is a married woman (claim (2)), but the speech act at (4) is not in that context, so it's not surprising that they have different meanings

What you're missing (of my interpretation) is that there's no such thing as an independent fact that john is a married woman, someone must believe John is a woman. That John is a married woman is (and only is) someone's belief, so (2) and (3) are just direct contradictions, in this context.

You are drawing a distinction between a sentence and a claim. What is the distinction? — Michael

A sentence is a collection of words, a claim is a speech act. Only the latter has a meaning.

Is the distinction such that the sentence "John is a bachelor iff John is a man and John is unmarried" doesn't mean the same thing as the sentence "John is a bachelor iff the language community generally believes that John is a man and unmarried," and that the sentence "it is raining" doesn't mean the same thing as the sentence "I believe that it is raining"? — Michael

Sentences do not have meanings, only speech acts have meanings, sentences are just collections of words. The closest I'd be willing to go toward your model is to say that sentences have collections of meanings depending on the speech acts they are used in - for example "it's raining" (the sentence) has a fairly circumscribed set of meanings (circumscribed by the culture using it). It's not going to be used to greet a stranger, or annul a marriage, it's going to be used mainly in the context of the various behaviours we have around rain. But I doubt that's close enough for what you want to claim.

Incidentally, this distinction you seem to be making between sentences and claims seems to be the same distinction I made earlier between propositions and speech acts that you initially denied: — Michael

No. I can define a sentence other than a speech act (a collection of words arranged according to rules of grammar). I don't know what a proposition would be unless it was a speech act. If you're now saying that a proposition is more like a sentence (a collection of words arranged according to rules of grammar), then I'm happy with that distinction. Propositions wouldn't have any meaning though.

So you are interpreting the sentence "John is a bachelor iff John is a man and John is unmarried" as the sentence "John is a bachelor iff the language community general believe that John is a man and unmarried". — Michael

No I'm interpreting the claim "John is a bachelor iff John is a man and John is unmarried" as the claim "John is a bachelor iff the language community general believe that John is a man and unmarried"

Claims are one type of speech act. There is no single 'meaning' of the sentence. It means whatever use it is put to in the speech act in which it is uttered.

A claim to any factual knowledge (as a type of speech act), is generally of the form 'I believe x and most people in my community sufficiently expert in x would agree'

Even if you're the only person in the world who believes x, it's still the same claim. To use your Copernicus example. "I know the earth goes around the sun" is that Copernicus believes the earth goes round the sun and anyone sufficiently expert (ie, once he's educated them) would agree.

The alternative is to accept a situation where I believe x for reasons {a, b, c, and d} but that I also believe everyone, when taught reasons {a, b, c, and d} will still not believe x. That's tantamount to private rules, it makes no sense.

people who are trying to harm you — EricH

People who are trying to harm you and people who happen to harm you because they are wrong are two very different categories of people.

This seems to be another common theme here, judging other people's intents using your beliefs. Other people act on the basis of their beliefs, not yours.

So if you believe taking the vaccine is the best way to look after people, you can't judge others as selfish and heartless for not taking the vaccine. That would only be fair if they also thought the vaccine is the best way to look after people, yet didn't take it. If they think the vaccine is overall more harmful then you'd judge them to be mistaken, not selfish.

I can get behind the idea that selfish people deserve any negative consequence they reap, I find it a lot harder to get behind the idea that mistaken people do.

No I didn't. — Isaac


Yes you did. Here:

John is a bachelor iff:

1) My language community generally believe that John is a man, and
2) My language community generally believe believe that John is unmarried — Isaac — Michael

This is now the third time I've pointed out the context of that partial quote. If you don't understand, you can just ask, but please don't keep disingenuously quoting parts of what I say to make some kind of 'gotcha', it's not a level of discussion I'm interested in. I said.

I'd interpret the claim as...

John is a bachelor iff:

1) My language community generally believe that John is a man, and
2) My language community generally believe believe that John is unmarried — Isaac

I am simply informing you of how language works. — Michael

So how did you learn how language works but I didn't? Did I miss something? Why are we in a situation where what you claim is just 'the way it is', but what I claim is subject to critique? Are you really so narcissistic as to think that the way things seem to you must be just exactly the way things are and people who see things differently must simply be ill-informed, awaiting your enlightenment?

What "it's raining" is used to convey is a weather condition. — InPitzotl

How can an expression convey a weather condition? Weather conditions are made of atmospheric molecules? You seem on the one hand to want to talk in the abstract, but then on analysis assume those abstracts are concrete.

The fact that you've set up a scenario where the speaker believes it's raining simply reflects your bias to make the statement about beliefs. You didn't conclude that someone believes that it's raining from the statement "it's raining"; you concluded it from the fact that a person uttered that statement, and even then that is a fallible inference. — InPitzotl

"it's raining" is a speech act, or a written act, or a question-in-a-quiz act, but whatever, it is an act of human beings in a culture, it is not a work of nature, not a law of physics. It's 'used' to do whatever it's used to do, not one god-given purpose. Most of the time, it's used to get the listener to believe it's raining (by which I mean have a tendency to act as if it's raining - put a coat on, carry an umbrella, write a poem about it...). If you want there to be a 'meaning' to it other than the use it's put to, you'll need to decide how we're going to determine what that 'meaning' is. I'm not sure that 'it's what I say it is', is quite good enough.

(C) resulting in (D) does say something about whether (A) is true or not — InPitzotl

How?

So once we've looked out of the window it definitely is raining? — Isaac

It no more follows that (A) being about what's going on outside means that once we've looked outside it is definitely raining than it follows that a person uttering A means that they definitely believe A. — InPitzotl

You said

I don't see what's stopping us from looking out windows. — InPitzotl

in response to my reductio of "I know..." requiring the subject to be 'true'. If we look outside we don't get to find out if "it's raining" is true do we? We just gain more justification for our belief that it's raining. At no point do we find out that 'it's raining' is true, so add in '...is true' to the meaning of 'I know...' makes it impossible for anyone to use the term correctly. That just seems silly.

What would you surmise option 2 in the quiz above is about? — InPitzotl

Option (2) isn't about anything. It's part of a whole expression-act which is about the language game of quizzes.

Ascertained to be an independent fact. — Isaac

Let me fix that for you: "Ascertained its veracity". — InPitzotl

But we haven't ascertained its veracity, you admit yourself, we could still be wrong. We've gathered more justifications for believing it, but in JTB, we already have justifications and beliefs, the question is how to add the T.

Then it's not raining. Unless it is. Regardless, the test of this would be to look outside. — InPitzotl

What? You've just agreed that by looking outside we might not determine if 'it's raining' is true and then said that regardless the test of it's truth is to look outside?

You previously claimed that John is a bachelor because the language community believes that John is an unmarried man. — Michael

No I didn't. As I clarified in my previous post...

You said:

There's nothing more to John being a bachelor than my felicitously using the term 'bachelor'. — Isaac


This is false. — Michael


I was referring to the meaning of the word 'bachelor'. It has no meaning beyond that which it is felicitously used for. — Isaac

A 'bachelor' is not a thing outside of language community declaring it to be a thing - felicitous use of the term 'bachelor', that's all I'm saying there.

Yes they do. The "it is raining" part of "I believe that it is raining" has a meaning, and that meaning is different to the "it is not raining" part of "I believe that it is not raining," and both meanings are different to the "Paris is the capital city of France" part of "I believe that Paris is the capital city of France."

When I believe that it is raining, what do I believe? That it is raining. When I believe that Paris is the capital city of France, what do I believe? That Paris is the capital city of France. Beliefs have propositional content, and that propositional content can be (and is) asserted as a proposition.

The proposition "it is raining" refers to the weather. It asserts something about what is actually the case. It is true iff water is falling from the clouds and false otherwise. It has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that it is raining and nothing to do with whether or not you believe that it is raining and nothing to do with whether or not the language community believes that it is raining. And the same principle applies to "John is a bachelor," "the Sun orbits the Earth," and "X is true." — Michael

Because...?

Since it's Australia, I'm guessing a reasonably civilized/humane approach — jorndoe

Ahh yes, civilised internment against their will.

"Would you mind awfully if we imprisoned you for a few weeks?...cup of tea?"

'Cos people are forever scaling fences to escape from civilised, humane treatment.

I suspect they had in mind Australia's notoriously civilised and humane treatment of its indigenous population.

https://www.welcometocountry.org/australias-brutal-treatment-of-aboriginal-people/

https://hir.harvard.edu/police-violence-australia-aboriginals/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australia-accused-of-genocide-against-aborigines-1263163.html

What could they possibly have had to worry about when forcibly put behind a fence?