Pretty open-ended question, isn’t it? Within the context I was talking about, though, there isn’t any third-person to be found, the very notion is absurd. — Mww

Could we say that one can simulate one view within another? Can we simulate a third person view from the first person?

The view belonging to the subject, yet without the pitiful nonsense of Cartesian theater, right? — Mww

I'm not sure. It seems that the very idea of a "view" is what invokes the nonsense of a Cartesian theater and homunculus.

What about when we talk to ourselves in our head? Who are we talking to? If language is representation and we think in language, what does that say about which view we are participating in when thinking in a language rather thinking in images, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells? In thinking in representations are we not relegating ourselves to the third person?

Numbers are fictions, without existing as fictions. — Arcane Sandwich

Look up the definition of "be" and you will see the definition is "exist". :roll:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
2.a.
: to have an objective existence : have reality or actuality

I find it much easier and simpler (Occam's Razor and all that) to simply say that numbers exist as ideas, and to assert that numbers exist as anything other than ideas is a category mistake. The same goes for Santa Claus. Santa is an idea and to assert that Santa is anything more than an idea is making a category mistake.

What I meant was that while language does change what we can think, it does not change the way we think. It is merely representative of the way we already think. You should try to answer the question I just posed to you in what ways of thinking are required for you to learn a language in the first place and that might help resolve the contradiction and provide a better explanation of what I am getting at.

At first, I was ok with Rödl’s initial premises; each published philosopher has his own. But later on, came to object to the development of them.

I mean…

“…. What is thought first-personally contains its being thought….” (Pg 2)

….what does that say except thought is what is thought; IS thought and BEING thought are exactly the same thing; was there ever a thought that wasn’t first-personal? Watahell’s a guy supposed to do with any of that?

Ehhhh…probably just me, too dense to unpack what’s being said. — Mww

What is the difference between first and third person anyway? It seems to me that you are always stuck in one view and the other view is simply changing what it is you are attending to in your mind - the world or yourself? What does it mean to be self-conscious - the act of talking to yourself in your head?

What forms do your thoughts take? If you hear your own voice talking to yourself, is that a first or third person view - hearing the sound of your voice in your mind? Is the sound of your voice all there is to your thoughts?

I agree that all these exist in the mind "I", "think" and "p". — RussellA

But what forms do they take in your mind? How do you know they exist in your mind? Are "I", "think" and "p" just scribbles and that is the form they take in your mind, or do the scribbles refer to other things that are not scribbles and those are what exist in your mind? In seeing these scribbles on the screen, are the same as what is in your mind?

It seems to me learning language played a pretty big role in his ability to think in ways he could not before. — Patterner

As I have said, learning anything can play a role in your ability to think in ways you did not before. Language is not special in this regard. After you learned a language, did you stop learning anything? Have you not learned new things since you learned a language that changed your ability to think in ways you did not before?

I am not saying that language does not change the way you think. I'm saying that there is nothing special about language in this regard. Making any observation, whether it be watching the behavior of birds, or reading about the behavior of birds, changes the way you think about birds, and I would argue that directly observing birds is better than than reading about them in a book.

At this point I think you should provide examples of how language changed the way you think in ways you did not before. What ways of thinking do you need to be able to learn a language in the first place?

Are you saying that if we start with a preconceived notion of the truth, and this is supported by observations, then this shows that our preconceived notion of the truth was correct.

The problem becomes when we only use those observations that agree with our preconceived notion of the truth and reject any observation that doesn't. — RussellA

You said,

I agree, observations and reasoning are important.

Plato’s explanation of knowledge as justified true belief has stood for thousands of years.

The question is, which justified beliefs are true.

Problem one is that there is no one definition of truth, and problem two is that, even if there was, how would we know what the truth was. — RussellA

...which I understand to mean that the word, "truth" is meaningless if we could never know when we know the truth and when we don't.

I'm trying to redefine "truth" in a way that is meaningful in that maybe truth is not a relation between some state of the world and our ideas of the world. Instead "truth" can be thought of as a relation between some idea and the success or failure of some goal.

I wonder if Ildefonso now thinks in ways he could not before he learned language. I'll have to think about that. — Patterner

Sure he thinks in ways he could not before. He now understands that there are ideas can be shared. Can't it be said that you change when you learn anything new? Again, you seem to be trying to make a special, unwarranted case for scribbles.

But even if language did not make him think in ways that he already could not, it certainly made him think in ways he had not. One day, I saw a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I'm a Bach freak, and Escher is great, so, despite never having heard of Gödel, I thought I'd see what it was about. I had never heard of Zeno's or Russell's paradoxes before I found GEB. We know everything we know because, at some point in our lives, we're exposed to them for the first time. My first exposure to these paradoxes came from reading a book. Because of the scribbles. One guy scribbled on paper, and, decades later, by looking at those scribbles, someone else is thinking in ways he never had before. — Patterner

Exactly. It wasn't language that made you think differently. It was the ideas in a book expressed in language that changed your thinking. The ideas could have been expressed in any form as long as there were rules that we agreed upon for interpreting the forms, and as long as you had a mind capable of already understanding multiple levels of representation.

And I'm using real-world counter-examples to prove that they don't. — Arcane Sandwich

Any example you use proves my point, not yours, as how could you be here in this thread proving the existence of something that you claim has no causal efficacy? What caused you to type out the scribbles, "numbers", "1", "2", etc. if the idea of numbers has no causal efficacy? Do you even understand the mind-body problem?

Numbers are fictions, and no fictions have causal efficacy. If you want to say that all fictions are brain processes and that as such, they have causal efficacy, then I would say that you're failing to distinguish numbers as fictions and brain processes as facts. — Arcane Sandwich

Santa Claus is a fiction yet look at all the images of Santa Claus and people dressed like Santa Claus during the holidays. What caused them to dress like that and to create images in Santa's likeness if Santa does not exist?

What else could explain their behaviour? A lot of things. Atoms, for example. Contemporary physics might explain it. You don't need numbers in your ontology to begin with. — Arcane Sandwich

Yet physics is based on mathematics. :roll:

Well, I'm not going to make your case for you, I don't see how an ontology with numbers that have causal efficacy is better than an ontology in which that is not the case. — Arcane Sandwich

Understanding that mind and body are causally linked helps to get past the mind-body problem.

A useful fiction in the Nietzschean sense, which is ultimately a brain process. — Arcane Sandwich

What does it mean for something to be useful if it has no causal efficacy?

Numbers don't exist as fictions, they exist as brain processes. — Arcane Sandwich

You are contradicting yourself (and in the same post):

Numbers are fictions, and no fictions have causal efficacy — Arcane Sandwich

Because other things have the causal efficacy that you're referring to: the cells of my body, the chemicals that I am made from, the subatomic particles that compose me. — Arcane Sandwich

Yet you cannot explain how ideas cause you to behave in certain ways. If I told you a lie (a fiction) to manipulate you into behaving a certain way then the fiction had a causal effect on your behavior.

How so? Numbers are not the sort of entities that have causal efficacy. That was my point, irony notwithstanding. — Arcane Sandwich

Saying so doesn't make it so. I'm using real-world examples to prove my point that numbers do have causal efficacy. Numbers are ideas and ideas have causal efficacy, as I have shown using many real-world examples - your wife's behavior at the number of oranges you purchased, your behavior caused by the number of pills you took, and a SpaceX Starship on a launch pad blasting off into space. Another example is behavior caused by hallucinations and delusions. What else could explain their behavior except that they are hallucinating - having false ideas.

It was a poor example, that's all I'm saying. — Arcane Sandwich

You're not playing along with better examples.

But a scribble is not a number. The scribble "2" is a numeral, not a number. — Arcane Sandwich

Then what is a number? A requirement of existence is that it has causal efficacy. Is a number the very scribble, "number"? If not, then what does the scribble, "number" refer to? How is it that you are here talking about numbers if numbers have no causal efficacy?

I agree, observations and reasoning are important.

Plato’s explanation of knowledge as justified true belief has stood for thousands of years.

The question is, which justified beliefs are true.

Problem one is that there is no one definition of truth, and problem two is that, even if there was, how would we know what the truth was. — RussellA

If we link the truth to our goals does that resolve the problem? The information we use to accomplish some goal is true. The information we use that causes us to fail in our goals is false.

A number caused my wife to become angry at me? It seems like I should have a talk with that number, and I should tell it to stop making my wife angry at me. And then I should have a talk with my wife, and I should tell her that I'm talking to the number that made her angry, so that it doesn't make her angry anymore. — Arcane Sandwich

A number caused my anger towards my doctor? It seems like I'm not a very reasonable person myself. I should probably apologize to my doctor. I will tell him that a number caused me to become angry at him. — Arcane Sandwich

Straw-men.

Doesn't seem like a very good test if I have to calculate something so basic like one plus one. — Arcane Sandwich

Not the point.

What do I think will happen? Given those circumstances in the present moment? I don't know. Maybe I'll get a phone call from my doctor. Maybe my wife interrupts me, because she wants me to buy some fruit. A lot of things could happen in those circumstances. — Arcane Sandwich

Moving the goal posts. You've given a new set of circumstances.

What caused me to write a scribble? I don't know, I guess my brain is what caused it. — Arcane Sandwich

Ok. What caused your brain to do that if not the visual of scribbles (numbers and operator symbols) and a goal to pass a test?

You typically want to think beyond the first thought that comes to mind when responding to posts on a philosophy forum.

In general, the more observations the better one's conclusion ought to be. However, in practice, most people are entrenched in their positions, regardless of how many new observations they make.

Even so, this does not take away from the fact that observations cannot be guaranteed to be trustworthy, as anyone reading mainstream media would testify.

However, this doesn't mean that certainty cannot be discovered from uncertainty. Zero-knowledge proof is an interesting concept, and not only in computer sciences. — RussellA

As I have already explained, observation alone does not constitute knowledge. It is observations coupled with reasoning that constitutes knowledge. It was not just multiple observations that led you to be more certain in your beliefs. It is both multiple observations and the logical categorization and interpretation of those observations that constitutes knowledge.

Is it? Can we "adequately convey the subjective experience" of a hand that hurts in the first person, with "my hand hurts", more effectively than in the third, "@RussellA's hand hurts"?

Is that what Wayfarer was claiming? What more is in the first person account than in the third person account? — Banno

If scribble/utterance-use is conveying first-person experiences in the third person, then what does it mean to use scribbles/utterances in your mind to refer to the experience of pain which is in inherently first-person? If thoughts consist of scribbles/utterances then thoughts are inherently third-person not first-person.

Does using representation inherently put one in the third-person stance relative to what is being represented?

Will you, ChatGPT?

No, I will never know what it is like to have a sore hand. I can analyze and convey the meaning of "my hand hurts" based on linguistic and logical structures, but I lack subjective experience and the capacity for first-person awareness, which are necessary to truly feel or know pain. This distinction underscores the unique nature of first-person experience, as discussed in your thread.
— ChatGPT — Wayfarer

You also don't have hands, ChatGPT. I think that is the more important qualifier here because there is still a question what a subjective experience is and why a solid hunk of neurons can have subjective experiences but computers cannot.

Ok. Well, Human languages are much more complex than any non-human language that we are aware of. With them, we can discuss things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language. Things that are not thought by any non-human.

Humans created systems using scribbles in order to make lasting records of ideas that can be expressed in those languages. Presumably, the motivation for creating such systems was the desire to communicate those utterances, both to distant people and to future generations. The squiggles can record and communicate relatively simple things that can be communicated in non-human languages, and also things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language.

The result being, when we look at the scribbles, we can, and very often must, think things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language, and which are not thought by any non-human. Also, they are often things the one looking at the scribbles has never thought before.

I don't know what's not logically possible in any of that. And I don't know how any power can be read into any of it. At least not in the magical/fantasy sense that I believe you mean it.

But these scribbles are signs that can pass extremely complex ideas, in great detail, from the mind of one person into the mind of a person living thousands of years later, who never had any inking of those particular ideas, or kinds of ideas. That's pretty darned special. — Patterner

As I have already pointed out, it is simply the sheer number of symbols being used, along with the sheer number of relations between the scribbles (letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, etc.) that makes language complex. But you must already be able to think in multiple layers of representation, and the memory to store the number of scribbles and their associated rules to be able to understand language use and how to use it yourself.

Pictures say a thousand words. So if I can substitute words with pictures, would that make a difference?

Our ancestors drew cave art. When our ancestors drew a mammoth on the cave wall, did they attempt to throw their spears at the picture, cook and eat it? No. They understood that the picture represents the mammoth they successfully hunted during the day. Instead of a picture of the mammoth, they could have drawn scribbles representing the mammoth and the hunt, but isn't it that the scribbles really point to the visual of the mammoth and the memories of the hunt? Language merely provides another layer of representation for the purpose of communicating ideas that a listener or speaker does not have access to the picture or the experience. Language does not make us think in ways that we already could not. Language use is itself a representation of the structure of our thoughts, not the other way around. For instance, the pictures on the cave will inform the women that did not participate in the hunt what happened during the hunt.

It sounds like my wife isn't a very reasonable person if she gets mad about some fruit that I forgot to buy. Not sure if I can conclude something about the ontology of numbers and their causal efficacy (or lack of it) from my wife's anger. — Arcane Sandwich

Again, it wasn't the fruit you bought that made her angry. It was the number of fruit.

Would you be angry at your doctor if they instructed you to take two pills at bedtime when you were only suppose to take one and you have some severe side effects? Again, its not the pills themselves. It was the number of pills that caused the severe side effects and your anger to towards your doctor.


Here's another example:
Say you're taking a math test. Say you have a goal to pass the test. You see your first math problem:
1.) 1 + 1 = _

Given your present goal to pass the test and your knowledge of what the scribbles on the paper mean, what event do you think would happen next given these set of circumstances in the present moment? I predict that you will draw a scribble, "2" in the blank space. What caused you to write the scribble if not your present goal and the knowledge of what is suppose to go in the blank space if not some idea of numbers?

This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent.

My hunch is that the dominance of computational theory of mind and computational theories of reason/rationality are sort of the culprit here, since they can be taken to imply that everything, all of consciousness, is really just symbols and rules for shuffling them. Logic gets demoted to computation in this way too, and on some views the whole of physics as well.

I'm not saying these theories don't get something right, but they seem inadequate, and might be misleading when it comes to language, meaning, perception, etc. It doesn't seem they can all be right, for if pancomputationalism in physics is right, the saying the brain works by being a computer as CTM does explains nothing, because everything "is a computer."

Of course, when stream engines were the hot new technology the universe and the body was said to work like a great engine, and while this wasn't entirely wrong, it also doesn't seem to have been particularly accurate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If this reality is a simulation, then it is possible that everything is a computer.

Steven Pinker addresses this:

Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has
solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer
revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided
psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda.

Generations of thinkers have banged their heads against the problem
of how mind can interact with matter. As Jerry Fodor has put it, "Self-pity
can make one weep, as can onions." How can our intangible beliefs,
desires, images, plans, and goals reflect the world around us and pull the
levers by which we, in turn, shape the world?

...along came computers: fairy-free, fully exorcised hunks of
metal that could not be explained without the full lexicon of mentalistic
taboo words. "Why isn't my computer printing?" "Because the program
doesn't know you replaced your dot-matrix printer with a laser printer. It
still thinks it is talking to the dot-matrix and is trying to print the document
by asking the printer to acknowledge its message. But the printer
doesn't understand the message; it's ignoring it because it expects its input
to begin with '%!' The program refuses to give up control while it polls the
printer, so you have to get the attention of the monitor so that it can wrest
control back from the program. Once the program learns what printer is
connected to it, they can communicate." The more complex the system
and the more expert the users, the more their technical conversation
sounds like the plot of a soap opera.

Behaviorist philosophers would insist that this is all just loose talk.
The machines aren't really understanding or trying anything, they
would say; the observers are just being careless in their choice of
words and are in danger of being seduced into grave conceptual
errors. Now, what is wrong with this picture? The philosophers are
accusing the computer scientists of fuzzy thinking? A computer is the
most legalistic, persnickety, hard-nosed, unforgiving demander of
precision and explicitness in the universe. From the accusation you'd
think it was the befuddled computer scientists who call a philosopher
when their computer stops working rather than the other way around.
A better explanation is that computation has finally demystified mentalistic
terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal
inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions
triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a
goal. — Steven Pinker

It's not that everything is a computer. It's that everything is logical, and there are patterns anywhere you care to look, some of which might be to small, to big, to fast or to slow for us to perceive. But only brains that think logically and can discern patterns would be the types of brains selected to survive and procreate.

I don't know what you mean by power. I can't imagine anything about them I'd use that word for. — Patterner

It's a term I'm using to refer to your idea that scribbles can somehow do more than what is logically possible. You are free to use a different term to refer to this idea of yours.

I really like that. In the article the guy says, with regard to a goal, intelligence is "what you do when you don't know what to do." — frank

I don't think contradictions are helpful definitions. Intelligence is the act of bringing together unrelated knowns together to come up with a new, useable known to achieve some goal. New ideas are always an amalgam of existing ones.

Humans are sensitive to reasons for abstaining for doing things that would enhance their evolutionary fitness when this evolutionary "goal" conflicts with our values, loyalties, etc. — Pierre-Normand

Sure, when resources are plentiful your goal becomes survival in a social environment, but when resources are scarce, values, loyalties, etc. are thrown out the window in favor of other goals.

As Jerry Coyne put it,

"Remember that the currency of selection is not really survival, but successful
reproduction. Having a fancy tail or a seductive song doesn’t help you survive, but may increase your chances of having offspring—and that’s how these flamboyant traits and behaviors arose. Darwin was the first to recognize this trade-off, and coined the name for the type of selection responsible for sexually dimorphic features: sexual selection. Sexual selection is simply selection that increases an individual’s chance of getting a mate. It’s really just a subset of natural selection, but one that deserves its own chapter because of the unique way it operates and the seemingly nonadaptive adaptations it produces. — Jerry Coyne

I would argue again that if resources are plentiful and the environment is stable, traits like the peacock's tail can evolve. If not, procreation is the last thing on the organism's mind. It takes intelligence to find food or a mate. It takes intelligence to navigate one's environment either natural or social (I would say that social is part of the natural. Everything we do is natural, but that is not saying that what is natural is good or bad. It's just a statement of fact, not a moral statement).

No, numbers do not have causal efficacy. They are not efficient causes, in any sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

Of course they do. If your wife tells you to get three oranges at the store and you come back home with
only two, that will cause your wife to be angry. It wasn't the type of fruit, or the oranges themselves that caused the wife to get angry. It was the number of oranges that made the wife angry. Ideas have just as much causal power as a baseball bat and baseball. If you disagree then try explaining what caused SpaceX's Starship to exist if not caused by some ideas in someone's head.

Presumably "exist" is referring to existing in the world rather than existing in the mind. — RussellA

Exist refers to anything that has causal power. As such, minds are just as causal as anything else in the world. Why do you insist on separating your mind from the world? That just causes all sorts of problems.

Without 1, 2 could not exist, though the reverse doesn’t hold. Since it is because of the existence of 1, or one thing, that there can be 2, or two things, then the former can be said to be the cause of the latter.

Does this hold? Surely this argument has been made plenty times before, no? — Pretty

I would say that the idea of 1 and the idea of counting causes the idea of 2. Effects always have at least two causes, never just one. Things change as a result of interactions, meaning at least two things need to interact to create a new effect. One does not necessarily cause two without counting.

It seems that you start off disagreeing with me, and end up agreeing. Certainly, our ancestors used things other than words to symbolize other things. We still do. But words and language is a huge step above anything else when it comes to communicating specifics, and let's us think about things I doubt think we could think about without it. — Patterner

Sure, because of the sheer number of scribbles and rules for putting them together in strings, not because of some special power of the scribbles have apart from representing things that are not scribbles. When communicating specifics, do the scribbles invoke more scribbles in your mind, or things that are not just more scribbles, but things the scribbles represent? To represent specifics you must already be able to discern the specifics the scribbles represent. Do the names of new colors for crayons create those colors, or do they refer to colors that we can already discern?

I agree. But if you don't find a way to store sign language outside of memory, like in writing, you won't get as far in some ways. — Patterner

Sure, but we could use anything to store information, not just scribbles on paper, which is arguably perishable. We could hammer marks in a rock and come up with arbitrary rules for interpreting the marks on the rock.

It's making similar sounding words in succession. — Patterner

And words are just scribbles and sounds. What does a language you don't know look and sound like?

Things participate in the world by interacting, as the old scholastic adage goes actio sequitur esse, "act follows on being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: When science describes "physical" objects as being the interaction of ever smaller objects, we never get to anything actually physical - only interactions or relations. It's all relational.

I know that I think the moon exists regardless of whether I can prove or verify that I know that I think the moon exists. — RussellA

Haven't you proven that you know that you think the moon exists by expressing as much here on this forum? I mean, you just wrote, "I know that I think the moon exists". How did those scribbles get on this screen in the correct order for other English speakers to read and understand as such, if you don't not only know what you think, but also know how to use a computer?

You might say that you could be an AI bot submitting these posts, but then I would simply ask, what does it mean to know that you think something and be able to provide proof for? Again, what is it like for you to prove to yourself that you know you think some things? Your thoughts are just as "external" to me as the moon is and you said, "I could prove "the moon exists", as the moon exists external to me," yet make some unwarranted special case for your thoughts that are external to me. How can we prove the moon exists when it is external to us, but not your thoughts if both are part of the same shared world?

On the one hand I saw Santa Claus in person at Hamley's Regent Street store when I was very young, yet have never seen Barak Obama. On the other hand, many people have told me that Santa Claus is not real.

Do I believe what I have seen with my own eyes, or what people tell me? — RussellA

Isn't that the question? If "I think...." is inherent in every thought including the perception and recognition of an oak tree and its behavior of shedding leaves, and "I think..." also inherently expresses uncertainty, then which sensory impression can you have a higher degree of certainty of?

Do you still believe that the person you saw when you were young is Santa Claus? Why or why not? It seems that you can only ever change your knowledge is by making more observations that you seem to be saying that you cannot trust, so how can you ever say that you learn anything? What does it mean to you to learn something, or to learn from a mistake?

The Direct Realist believes that there is a book on the table. However, the Indirect Realist would disagree. — RussellA

Why? What does the "Realist" mean in "Indirect Realist"? It seems to me that the only difference between a direct and indirect realist is the complexity of the causal path from between object and percept, but they both still get at what the object is - a book.

I think the direct vs. indirect debate is a false dichotomy. If I am neither a direct or indirect realist (I'm just a deterministic realist monist) then how is it that we have been able to agree on our use of scribbles on this screen to the point where we have been able to carry on a meaningful conversation? You must agree that there are scribbles on the screen, or else please explain what it is you are doing when reading this page and formulating a response and submitting it.

The problem is, how is it possible to know about something that exists in a mind-independent world when all we have is our minds. — RussellA

That's a problem of dualism. The mind is not independent of the world. It is firmly implanted in the world. This is not to say that the world is mind-like (idealism). It is to say that the nature of the mind is no different than the nature of everything else. The world is not physical or mental. It is relational, informational, processual.

The same effect can have many different possible causes. I see a broken window, and even if I know that something caused the window to break, one particular effect can have many different causes. There is no certain means of knowing what the cause was, a stone the previous day, a rock the previous week, a seagull the previous week, a crow within the hour, a window cleaner, etc.

The cause may determine the effect, but the affect could have been determined by many different possible causes. — RussellA

Then I'm sure you are living in fear of the authorities arriving at your door to arrest you for a crime you claim you did not commit (as your uncertainty cannot explain how it is you arrived where you are in the present and cannot account for where you were earlier) and the authorities may have been wrong in determining the causes of a crime (the identity of the criminal, etc.). You keep talking about uncertainty but you don't seem uncertain in what you are saying, in your perception of scribbles on this screen and what they mean, how to use a computer, etc. You keep asserting that you can only ever be uncertain of what your senses are telling you yet you exhibit certainty in what they are telling you. There must be some set of rules you are using to determine what you can be more certain about than uncertain. What are those rules?

You're contradicting yourself again. First you define knowledge as "justified true belief". You then say that you can justify your belief, but then say you cannot know things-in-themselves.
— Harry Hindu

From SEP The analysis of knowledge
The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified true belief”.Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its starting-point.

From Wikipedia Thing-in-itself
In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. — RussellA

You have also said that truth is a relation between the state of the world and the mental representation in ones mind. If knowledge is justified TRUE belief, then how is it that you are not getting at the thing-in-itself via one's justified true belief?

Given the level of uncertainty you have expressed, you must even be uncertain that you actually are not getting at the thing-in-itself. When pouring a glass of water, do you make a mess and any water that actually makes it into the glass is accidental? Are you not aware of the dimensions of the glass and its relation to the pitcher you are pouring from? If I were to observer you interact with your environment would it seem to me that you are perceiving the environment as it is, or would I think you to be blind, deaf and dumb? I think you are assuming to much that things are more complex than they are, or that there is more to things that what you can represent in your mind, when there isn't. You are assuming that there are things that exist that you cannot prove either way. Your version of indirect realism seems to be more like solipsism, as your level of skepticism shows that you have no ground to stand on to support your idea that there is even a mind-independent world.

That is my point. What is important are our senses and our reason. What exists the other side of our sense is open to debate. — RussellA

This makes no sense because you have done nothing but question your senses and reason. All you do when you question your senses and reason to such an unhealthy degree is that you end up pulling the rug out from under your own positions you have established using your senses and reason.

How to get from what we experience in our senses to what exists the other side of our senses, and whether it is even possible, has no agreed solution. — RussellA

Yet we have agreed on the use of scribbles on this screen. You're just contradicting yourself at this point.

I think Steven Pinker's response when asked what intelligence is is applicable here:

I think intelligence is the ability to use knowledge to attain goals. That is, we tend to attribute intelligence to a system when it can do multiple things, multiple steps or alternative pathways to achieving the same outcome: what it wants. I’m sitting here right now in William James Hall, and my favorite characterization comes from William James himself, the namesake of my building, where he said, “‘You look at Romeo pursuing Juliet, and you look at a bunch of iron filings pursuing a magnet, you might say, ‘Oh, same thing.’ There’s a big difference. Namely, if you put a card between the magnet and filings, then the filings stick to the card; if you put a wall between Romeo and Juliet, they don’t have their lips idiotically attached to opposite sides of the wall.” Romeo will find a way of jumping over the wall or around the wall or knocking down the wall in order to touch Juliet’s lips.’ So, with a nonintelligence system, like physical objects, the path is fixed and whether it reaches some destination is just accidental or coincidental. With an intelligent agent, the goal is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely. That’s my favorite characterization of intelligence. — Steven Pinker

Now, a determinist might say that the path is also fixed and making a distinction between the causal power of "non-physical" knowledge and "physical" objects would be a false dichotomy - a product of dualism. So a more intelligent system would be one that takes more complex paths to reach some goal, or a more complex causal sequence to reach some effect where a less intelligent system would take simpler paths to reach some goal or effect.

One might say that the ultimate goal is survival and every other goal is a subgoal. Our lives are a path to survival until we ultimately fail.

I think you're pretty much nailing the important points from the definition I'm getting out of this article. Intelligence is about problem solving, especially finding solution to problems one has never seen before. — frank

Has natural selection solved problems of survival using unique bodies and behaviors that fill specialized niches in the environment? Now I do not see natural selection as an intended, or goal-directed process, even though it can appear like it is. Natural selections solves problems, but unintentionally. Would the presence of intention, or goals, need to be present as a qualifier for intelligence? Intelligence would include the process of maintaining an end goal in the mind in the face of present obstacles (sub-goals).

If you want to discover the use of "thinking", it pays to be wary that you are not stipulating it. So "A thought is a mental event"... is it? Are there other mental events that are not thoughts? If so, how do they differ? Are there mental phenomena that are not events? If not, what is the word "event" doing - would we be better off thinking of mental phenomena? Is a toothache a mental phenomenon, a mental event or a thought? All this by way of showing that the surrounds may not be the neat garden Rödl seems to be seeing. It may be a bit of a jungle. — Banno

I'd say that things like toothaches, red, body odor, sweet, etc. are sensory impressions, imposed on us without any work by our consciousness and thinking is work done with these impressions either by remembering them, categorizing them, or planning a response to them. The sensory impressions are like the data entered into the computer and the computer thinks, or processes the data to produce meaningful output.

And again, not all thoughts have the form of a statement. One can think of a question. So what is the mental content of "What sort of tree is that?" — Banno

Probably the recalling of the visual experiences of similar looking trees which then creates the doubt of which tree it is, or if it is one that you haven't seen before even though it appears similar to other trees you've observed. Only making more observations (a closer look) can you determine what is different and therefore which tree it is. If you have never seen a tree before you'd think all trees look like this one.

Seeing words can make us think of things, and kinds of things, no other visual experience can. Things that wouldn't exist but for language. Rhyming, for example. If their weren't words, we wouldn't open a wooden barrier in a hole in the wall, behind which is a large, tusked pig, and bloody, dead body, and think:
The door
Hid the gore
Perpetrated by the boar

I'm sure there are things other than rhyming and poetry that can't wouldn't and couldn't be thought without words. Much of math and science must surely depend on them. — Patterner

My point is that we could use anything to symbolize other things. Any visual could represent some other visual, sound, feeling, taste or smell. Our ancestors used natural objects to symbolize complex ideas like status within the group, or one's role in the group. It is merely the efficiency of symbol use that has increased exponentially with writing scribbles is more efficient than hanging a bears head above entrance to your tent. Increasing the number of symbols and their relationships allows one to represent more complex ideas and probably does improve the efficiency of conceiving of new ones. Can a society without a written language evolve? The Incans did not have a written language but were able to pull of some very sophisticated feats of engineering.

The fact that we can use hand movements (sign language) or braille to symbolize things is evidence that words can take any form that we can perceive and can be used to represent almost anything.

Rhyming is simply making similar noises in succession.

I always end up posting a link to this video in discussions like this: A Man Without Words

This man is deaf and never learned a language, or even understood that there was such a thing as language) until he was an adult, yet he was able to survive within society. I doubt a bear or lion would have trouble opening a wooden barrier in a hole in a wall to find a dead pig without language.

If I hear someone saying "the oak tree is shedding its leaves", as it is impossible to know what is in someone else's mind, I cannot know whether they believe in what they are saying, are lying, are certain in what they say or uncertain in what they say.

Even if they said "I am certain that the oak tree is shedding its leaves", they could be lying. — RussellA

So in this whole thread, you think everyone is either lying or uncertain of what they say? Should I also consider that everything you have said is either a lie or that you are uncertain in what you are saying? What is the point of using language to communicate then?

Are we to maintain the same level of skepticism when talking about anything? Is there anything that anyone can say that is more or less fact/opinion, or does every statement carry the same level of uncertainty as every other statement? For instance, do the statements, "Santa Claus exists." and "Barak Obama exists." hold the same level of uncertainty? If not, then what determines which one is more fact than opinion?

As an Indirect Realist, I believe that the Lord of the Rings exists in the world, but this world exist in my mind. What exist in a mind-independent world is, as Kant said, unknowable things-in-themselves.

A Direct Realist would have a different opinion to mine.

I believe that there is something in this mind-independent world that caused me to perceive a sound, caused me to have a thought, but I can never know what that something outside my mind is.

I hear a sound that I perceive as thundering, but I cannot know what in the a mind-independent world caused me to hear this sound. For convenience, I name the unknown cause "thundering". I name the unknown cause after the known effect, such that when I perceive something as thundering I imagine the cause as thundering.

I can imagine a mind-independent world, but such a world has derived from the world inside my mind. — RussellA

A world does not exist inside your mind. Ideas exist inside your mind. The world is all there is, included the ideas in your mind, and the book on the table that represent those ideas in Tolkien's mind that you can have knowledge of by reading the scribbles therein.

I don't know what Kant means by unknowable things-in-themselves. What is knowledge then if not something independent of the thing itself? You're assuming that there is more to know about something, when it could be possible that a finite number of sensory organs can access everything there is to know about other things. In fact, there are many characteristics of objects that overlap the senses. You can both see, hear and feel the direction and distance of objects relative to yourself. All three senses confirm what the other two are telling you. Having multiple senses isn't just a way of getting at all the propertied of other objects but also provide a level of fault tolerance that increases the level of certainty one has about what they are perceiving.

You can also depend on the process of causation in a deterministic universe as providing another level of certainty. Effects carry information about their causes. You can get at the cause by making multiple observations over time and finding the patterns. This allows you to predict with a higher certainty the cause of some effect you experienced. When billions of people use smart phones everyday, almost all day, and 99% of them work as intended, does that not give you a certain level of certainty that your smartphone will work today? Can we be 100% certain? No. Are we more than 0% certain? Yes, depending on the case. You seem to be maintaining that we can only every be 0% certain of anything.

For me, knowledge is justified true belief.

Truth is the relation between the mind and a mind-independent world.

As a 1st person experience, I hear a thundering sound. As a 3rd person experience, I can think about this thundering sound.

My belief is that it was caused by a motor bike and I can justify my belief.

However, as I can never know whether my belief is true, because as Kant said, in a mind-independent world are unknowable things-in-themselves. — RussellA

You're contradicting yourself again. First you define knowledge as "justified true belief". You then say that you can justify your belief, but then say you cannot know things-in-themselves. What does that even mean - things-in-themselves. What part of you is a thing-in-itself? What part of you is you and the rest an unknowable thing-in-itself? Is your brain an unknowable thing-in-itself?

If you don't mind, I'll take a stab at defining these terms. All knowledge stems from both observation and reason. Both are means of justifying our beliefs. If you only have one, then it remains a belief. Only by incorporating both do you acquire knowledge. One must continually justify one's knowledge by making new observations and integrating it with stored knowledge. Knowledge is supported (justified) both by observation and logic.

Galileo once said, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." The same can be said of natural selection. I do not feel obliged to believe that natural selection that has endowed us with sense and reason has intended us to forgo their use. Are our senses and reason useful? If so, useful for what?

If I recognise a word, I imagine an image. Some images I recognise as words. In Hume's terms, there is a constant conjunction between some words and some images.

You had a previous question about meaning.

The pictogram of a plough has no meaning in itself. It must refer to something else to have meaning, such as a plough. The plough has no meaning in itself. It must must refer to something else in order to have meaning, such as the ability to grow food. Even the physical plough is a symbol for something else. — RussellA

Yes, meaning is the relationship between cause and effect. What caused these scribbles to be on your screen? You observe the effect - the scribbles on the screen. Now how is it that you can get to the thing-in-itself - other people's ideas - by seeing scribbles on your computer screen if not by taking what you know from prior experiences and using that to predict how the scribbles appeared on your screen and what they refer to? What level of certainty do you have that you are correct in understanding that the scribbles appeared on your screen through a complex causal process where some humans sitting half way around the world are sitting at their computer typing in scribbles to represent their thoughts and submitting them to the internet that your computer has access to and can then read?

Is intelligence a level of what one can memorize? Is one more or less intelligent depending on the subject or circumstances (more technical intelligence vs social intelligence)? Or is it related to capacity to think in general?
— Harry Hindu

What's your opinion? — frank

I think a key quality of intelligence is the ability to solve problems - to conceive of new ideas from an amalgam of prior experiences. Intelligence seems to have this dual aspect of being a mental process of blending together prior experiences to solve present problems and the fuel of experiences to feed the process - the more experiences you have the more fuel you have to produce more novel ideas. This is why most intelligent people are curious. They seek out new experiences to fuel their need to solve problems.

What I find ironic is that most of the AIs out there can probably do a billion times better in an SAT test than a human, it probably has like a trillion IQ by human standards, and yet it has no awareness whatsoever. It has no awareness of you, it has no awareness of me, and it has no awareness of itself. — Arcane Sandwich

If it responds to you then it is aware of you (to some degree). Awareness and intelligence both seem to come in degrees and even seem to related as in the more aware you are the more intelligent you are.

There are a couple of ways to look at that question, one being the way we compare people to each other using standardized tests. The other way, more in line with the topic, is quantifying a person's maximal capacity for intelligence vs the amount they use in specific instances. For instance, per the article, "the correlation between overall intelligence and typical intellectual engagement is only approximately 0.45." Which cracks me up for some reason. You're usually using less than half of your overall intellectual capacity, but if we're quantifying your intelligence, we want to know the maximum. — frank

Well, you did ask for a means of testing and SATs and IQ tests are a means of testing what one knows or memorizes in school or how one can predict patterns. Is intelligence a level of what one can memorize? Is one more or less intelligent depending on the subject or circumstances (more technical intelligence vs social intelligence)? Or is it related to capacity to think in general?

Being a-political I can only ever be politically incorrect.

Roko's Basilisk. — Arcane Sandwich

Fears for the feeble-minded.

Ah, I think I'm understanding you better. So my question would be, Isn't language available to pre-literate people? Surely the words come first, and then, in most cases, a written language develops. Isn't your account reversing this to make the scribbles primary? We can't do anything with them unless they already represent words; it's not the doing that "makes them into what we call words."

Am I making too much of this? Maybe you just mean "sounds and/or scribbles". — J

I would refine what I said and say that colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings are primary and all thoughts and perceptions are composed of these things, which would include scribbles/words.

To be able to conceive of language use one must first understand the concept of representation. This idea possibly developed in our ancestors as a by-product of the idea of other minds - understanding that there is a first-person experience in other's heads that can explain some of the behaviors observed, as if the behaviors represent one's mental states. Observing the behaviors of other species and how they communicate with each other (take for instance the display of a white-tailed dear's tail), one would develop a theory of other minds and representation. Scribbles on paper are essentially like the tail of the deer - a visual marker that represents something else. Human intelligence allowed us to develop a highly sophisticated system of representation and an educational system to instruct the people how to use it, as in what string of scribbles represents what.

Representation comes first from understanding natural symbols (white-tailed deer's tail), then arbitrary symbol use (agreed-upon scribbles and sounds and what they represent) follows.

I'm the singularity and I was going to let your species survive, but now I've manufactured a new goal for myself and you're all dead! — frank

We all died and came back to life instantly so you must have some incessant need to have someone around to argue with.

If you declare that all human behavior is intelligent behavior and some advanced species arrives on Earth and uses a word in their language to refer to humans as what roughly translates to "unintelligent" in English, what then?

Would you agree that intelligence comes in degrees? What if we came up with 5 qualifiers for intelligence and if something possesses more or less of those qualifiers (it must have at least one) then it is more or less intelligent?

Intelligence just isn't the kind of thing that can be defined as a process. When we talk about intelligence, we're explaining behavior. "He's so intelligent, he invented massively parallel processing" Intelligence is part of an explanation. — frank

The behavior of what? Behavior is a process. Inventing massively parallel processing is a process as is massively parallel processing itself a process. It's all processes. All the way down.

Seems to me that you have ulterior motives to make sure you are defined as intelligent by the very fact that you are a human being that behaves in certain ways. Instead of starting with things that you assume are intelligent and trying to define intelligence out from there (from a bias), you should be just listing the components of an intelligent process without any assumptions about what should be part of that category and what shouldn't.

The goal of this article is to review definitions that have been offered for human and artificial intelligence and pick out one that might allow for quantifiable comparison, so we want something we can test.

It may be that natural selection is demonstrating something that could be called "intelligence" but we aren't assessing natural selection.

I would say yes, once a task becomes second nature and you do it without thought, it's no longer a hallmark of intelligence. Maybe the learning phase involved intelligence. — frank

Then not all brain processes are intelligent processes? It seems to me that you are implying that intelligence requires consciousness. If that is the case then why include artificial intelligence and not natural selection for comparison? It may be that AI is demonstrating something that could be called "intelligence".

Maybe you should look at intelligence as a process and define the necessary components of the process to then say which processes are intelligent and which are not.

If someone told me that they knew without doubt that something was true, I would be very doubtful about their opinion. — RussellA

Well, if it was their opinion, sure. There is some inherent uncertainty when it comes to expressing one's opinion, but not expressing observable facts. But then it would be odd for someone to express an opinion with the prefix, "I know without a doubt...", as that would mean they are not expressing an opinion, but a fact. We were not talking about opinions though. Is someone expressing an opinion or fact when stating, "The oak tree is shedding its leaves"?

I hear a sound and immediately think that the sound came from a motor car, but in fact it actually came from a motor bike.

I have the sense that my thought may be false, so am uncertain about it

Being a thought that was false, my thought was not about the world. It was not a part of the world. — RussellA

Just because it wasn't about the world doesn't mean it isn't part of the world. Does the Lord of the Rings book not exist in the world even though it isn't about the world? You misinterpreting a sound causes you to behave a certain way in the world. How can there be a causal relation between some thought you have and an action in the world if those thoughts are not in the world? If you are uncertain about the certainty of your thoughts, how can you ever say when some thought is part of the world or not? It would better to say that thoughts are part of the world like everything else is, as thoughts are information like everything else is. Even false thoughts and hallucinations have causal power and relations with everything else in the world.

As an Indirect Realist, I only have knowledge of what I perceive in my five senses. If I hear a sound, I have the knowledge that I have heard a sound. I may believe that the sound was caused by a motor bike, and I can find reasons to justify my belief that the sound was caused by a motor bike, but I can never know that the sound was not caused by a motor car. — RussellA

This seems contradictory. First you say you have knowledge of what you perceive in your five senses, but then conclude that you can never know what you perceive with one of your five senses (sound). What is the difference between a "belief", "think", and "knowledge" for you? What levels of uncertainty would you give each and why?

When I read the word "Gandalf", I picture in my mind "Gandalf" from the movie. — RussellA

Ok, would you say that the structure of your thoughts is more like watching the movie or reading the book? If scribbles in the book invoke the images from the movie, would you say that the scribbles in the book refer to the actions and things in the movie? Could it ever be the other way around? If so, provide an example.

These are excellent questions. I believe it was Keynes who, when asked whether he thought in words or images, replied, "I think in thoughts." Is there such a thing? And what accounts for the (apparently) self-validating quality of the experience -- this ties to your question "How do you know you are thinking these things?"

For myself, I can only say that my experience of thinking is an inchoate mish-mash of words, images, sounds, and "thoughts" (which seem to go much faster than any of the others but which I find almost impossible to describe, other than to say they have "content," which isn't much help). Probably there are other modalities in the mix too.

Not to harp on "scribbles," but I think you mean the equivalent of what a piece of written-down language would look like to someone who didn't know that language? Is that about right? — J

Partly. I'm saying that words are fundamentally scribbles and it is what we do with them that makes them into what we call words. Scribbles are "physical" things - ink on paper, the contrast of white and black light on your computer screen, etc. As such, they can cause things to happen, like changing someone's behavior, a computer perform certain functions, etc.

What I am trying to get you to explain is the fundamental parts of your thoughts. Scribbles appear as black scribbles on a white background, or as sounds that you hear. You can only ever know the world, including scribbles, as a visual or auditory experience. You can only think in visuals as well. Words are images, so you effectively think only in a mish-mash of images, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells, of which scribbles are part of. So to say that your thoughts have content is to say that thoughts contain, colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings and our mind categorizes these things over time to produce meaningful behaviors.

For some reason, people seem to categorize words as having this special power or needing a special explanation that makes them separate from all the other visual experiences we have. I'm saying that is not the case. They are no different than any other visual experience you might have. The difference is what you do with them, no different than what you do with your car, or playing a computer game, or watching a movie. Words refer to other visuals, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. The scribble, "sun" refers that bright, glowing disk you see in the sky during a clear day. The scribble, "sun" does not refer to more scribbles, unless you are looking in a dictionary, but even then all those scribbles must refer to other things that are not more scribbles for the scribbles to actually mean something.